Hiraeth
by Tafferling
Summary: He is a Ghost who likes to dream. She's a Guardian who wishes she didn't. When he found his Guardian, all he could think of was how they'd be great together. How they'd be heroes. Make a difference. Those sorts of things. But what he hadn't expected was just how badly he'd mess up. Because she remembers. Her name. Her death. And everything she lost.
1. Cosmic Castaway

**Book 1:**

**Eyes Up, Guardian**

* * *

**Chapter 1**

**Cosmic Castaway**

* * *

**L**ife on Earth is stubborn. Relentless. It eats at a derelict past, at civilisations that have come and gone, often leaving nothing behind but dust and ashes. Ashes, which it feeds on, greedy and green and defiant against a universe choked by darkness and war.

You'll find it where the ground is scorched, spiting the destruction one blade of grass at a time, and where thick vines and moss now strangle what's left of walls that'd been meant to keep rain and wind at bay. Flowers, bright and hopeful, cover battlefields once drenched in blood. Trees shove through asphalt. Bushes, laden with fat berries, grow from the skeletons of cars, and birds nest in the barrels of long-dead war machines.

Though, sometimes, things old and forgotten bloom, too.

And, _sometimes_, they're really noisy when they do.

A flock of birds takes off from the rusted roof of a car. Scattered by quick, electric guitar riffs and a staccato of sharp drum beats, they part around the small, white Ghost flitting between them. He's the source of the music, a tune older than the bone dust in the cars below him.

He rises and falls with the beat of it. Rolls and weaves to its lyrics about a cosmic castaway, sung by some forever-ago dead man. But he never stops moving. Sometimes, he stutters and slows. Doesn't lose his rhythm though, not once, even as his front plates twitch open and the whirr of another (and another and yet _ another_) scan is swallowed by the music.

Life on Earth is stubborn. Yes.

Relentless. Yes.

Well, so is he.

* * *

**Nothing**. Nada. Niks. Tidak ada. Rud a..a..ar.. b-ith? That one was probably all wrong, but yeah, _nothing_. He couldn't even find the soft tickle of golden age tech to dig into anywhere. Far as he could tell, everything, _everything_, along the stretch of old road he'd picked for today's round had rusted and fallen apart. What he got were bushes weaving in the wind, insects buzzing to and fro, and birds who got all offended they couldn't out-sing his music.

Sore losers, yeah?

Unlike him. He was a _great _loser, always gracious when he came up short (which didn't happen often, really), but that was beside the point since he hadn't lost anything. Just, ah, not _found _what he needed. _Who _he needed.

Not that that bothered him.

It _didn't. _He'd swear to the Traveler's shiny underbelly that it did. not.

His front plates squirmed.

. . .

Ghost jerked left, dove around a horribly bent, but miraculously still standing, lamp post, and propelled himself off the graveyard paved by asphalt and the ghosts of an age past.

Different ghosts. Not. Ghost ghosts. Small g. _Tiny, _itsy-bitsy g.

Know the difference.

He whizzed down a steep, wooded slope, crashing through lush leaves and barely skirting trunks and branches until the foliage spat him back out into the open. Right atop what'd probably once been a town. Way back when. Before it'd been... flattened. All of it. Yeah. Flattened. That seemed about the only word that aptly described what was left of it. A quick scan of his records showed it'd been host to a bitter last stand — right before being wiped off the map.

Which had happened a lot back then and truth be told he should have felt horrible about it. Instead, it stirred a spark of warm hope, because that's where you found heroes. Someone stubborn. Like him. Someone who hadn't given up. Someone who wouldn't bend to what destiny put on their shoulders. Someone to share his light with. Come what may.

He slowed, dimmed his music to a mere whisper, and swept around the town's outskirts.

_Click. Whirr. _

First, he bounced over a stubby fence. Right into a field of wild, tall grass brushing his shell. He'd cover that first. Had to start somewhere, right? Might as well do that here, where islands of weathered concrete poked from the gently wafting green sea — and — _Oh. _

A graveyard.

A literal one.

Not the sort that Earth had turned into, to the point where you didn't know where one ended and another began.

The music stopped. He had manners, after all.

Ironic, he thought. How the monuments to the dead liked to outlast the vestiges of the living.

His shell twitched again, plates folding in over his eye in a frown. "Well, that's grim. You're turning grim, Ghost, and that's not a good look on you."

And then he froze.

There.

_There! _

A burst of _something _knocked into him. A jolt of warmth, maybe. Or a spike of electricity shocking his core so thoroughly, he couldn't move a single joint. Try as he might. And he _tried _as he hung there, the sun suddenly heavy on his shell.

_There._

* * *

**I**t's like finding what you don't remember you lost.

Like picking up the thread to a thought you have long forgotten, and mending what's been torn in half.

* * *

**He** knew what to do. Didn't need to think. Or worry he'd get it wrong. No Ghost had _ever _gotten it wrong. Far as he knew, anyway.

Replaced by a gentle current, the jolt faded. He followed it, drifted along its soft pull, his shell quivering until it took him to the far edge of the graveyard, where the rusted, hollow, bulbous remains of a helicopter played host to a family of foxes.

"Shoo," he said. "Go."

They scattered in streaks of dirty red.

And maybe he _did _have nerves because it wasn't every day you found who your light led you to. Found the end of a search so long, even he'd stopped bothering to count.

Light welled from him, first through the cracks of his shell and then parting it to make room for a steady, silvery-blue pulse. Until the Traveler's light — _his _light — pulled back together what'd been torn.

Then, his shell snapped back together, he hovered there and stared.

Alright.

There she was. His Guardian. Huddled against the dead helicopter. That was fine. She was probably _really _disoriented. He spun slightly left. She was dressed in… baggy clothes at least a size too big (so he'd gotten that wrong, no big deal) and had tangled, long brown hair. Or maybe red. Redish. Her hands, balled into fists, pressed into the ground.

"Guardian?" he asked, dipping lower to float into her field of vision. If he'd had a stomach, that'd probably been falling through the earth at that point. That's what excitement felt like, he'd been told.

"Eyes up, Guardian."

It took a moment, but she did it.

And then she… ah… screamed.

In terror.


	2. Bricked

**Bricked**

* * *

**T**hey tell her to go home. To take care of herself. Spend time with friends.

_You'll be fine,_ they say.

It's impossible to believe them, but she tries.

She sits in the car for a while, her head on the steering wheel. On the radio, a news anchor sounds breathless as he talks about Mars. Those words of wonder pass her by unheard and she's lost. So lost. She turns the radio off. Digs her phone out and sits it down on her knee. Stares at it, her fingers itching to call someone, but she can't think of anyone.

She turns it off instead and drives.

When she wakes, the world has long forgotten her.

* * *

**N**icole couldn't see much. A whole lot of dirty greens and browns swam behind a muddy sheen of white and whenever she blinked, sharp pain lanced from the back of her eyes to pulse through her skull.

Couldn't hear much either, except a shrill whistle and the pounding of her heart against her ears, and every inch of her pinched. Her skin felt too tight. Her bones thrummed. And yet, at the core of it all, lodged somewhere between her stomach and her heart, sat a tight knot of heat. Like she'd swallowed a sun. A sun that held her together — and she was convinced that if she spat it out, she'd fall apart.

Which was horribly weird and so Nicole concluded she'd lost her mind and that she'd be throwing up soon, even if she couldn't remember drinking near enough. Or at all.

Just…

Hands balled into fists and pressed into something hard and grainy, she clawed for the memory flitting by.

…thinking, _who'll feed the dog?_

A whiff of grass and rust tickled her nose, but what she tasted were brine and blood. Her stomach turned.

"Guardian?"

Nicole blinked again, more frantically this time, until the fog in her eyes lifted and she saw the earth against her knuckles and the grass creeping in around her.

"Eyes up, Guardian."

The voice, accompanied by soft whirrs and clicks, was persistent. It sounded like a man talking through a speaker somewhere. Somewhere close. A touch of air brushed her cheek.

She looked up. Squinted. The bright blue sky tried to burn her eyes from their sockets and so at first she thought the thing floating in front of her was a mirage. A small, twisted afterimage dancing in her vision. Made of… triangle… things. With a… bright blue eye? The eye seemed to squint back at her. The triangles clicked. Moved.

Panic slammed into her. Hard. It came with a rush of water. Enveloped her, flushed the warmth from her. Choked her. And she drowned.

Hundreds upon hundreds of years too late, Nicole screamed.

* * *

**H**is Guardian scrambled back. Away from him. She knocked into the old helicopter, halfway tipping into it with her legs still kicking and then she— uh— found a rock.

And chucked it at him.

Almost hit him, too! A tiny, confused spark of pride spluttered somewhere in his processing core — even as he barely rolled out of the rock's trajectory.

"Oh dear." He stabilised himself, darted after her, and scanned through all manners of scripts collected by other Ghosts. The ones who'd found their Guardians already and had managed to get them _not_ to— throw more rocks.

"Get away from me!" she shouted and here came the second rock.

He bobbed under that one too and stopped midair in the open side of the helicopter. She'd fled all the way into it, far back as she could manage. Sharp shadows wrapped around her as she sat there hugging her knees to her chest. Her shoulders jerked with how quickly she was breathing in and out.

_Oh no._

"You're safe, Guardian." He inched forward. Just a _little._ "Even if all of this must be terribly confusing," he added and sunk lower. Closer.

Her eyes fixed on him. Wide. Terrified. Tears welled in them and his core pinched painfully.

This was perfectly normal, right? Had to be. He hesitated, his shell rolling a breath of an inch from left to right.

"I'm a Ghost," he started, which made her eyes snap open even wider, so he added, quickly, "I'm _your_ Ghost. And I'm here to help you. See, you've been, ah, dead for a long, long time. But now you're not anymore, obviously, because I've brought you back." His voice tipped over slightly and he shimmied closer. "The _Traveler_ brought you back. Its light did. Just wait until you see it, it's— it's— wait, let me show you." He tilted to the side and, with a click and an excited beep, projected a shimmering image inside the dark belly of the helicopter: the Traveler, its silver-white mass perched above the wide sprawl of the city.

His Guardian made a small noise.

"I've been looking for you for so long, you can't imagine. And now I can't wait to take you there," he blurted. "Home. Take you _home,_ to the Traveler and to the city. They call it the _Last_ City—" The image shifted to show the towering walls, then the streets filled with colour and life. "Or humanities last bastion, doesn't that sound grand? It's grand. Totally. Grand. And it will all make sense there, I promise. You'll understand why I brought you back. Why my light chose you, Guardian."

"Nicole," she said, her voice raw and choked.

Ghost froze. The image winked out and he twisted around, his eye cutting to her. She'd squeezed her knees together tightly and pulled them even closer to her chest.

"What?" he asked and stared.

* * *

**W**as it frowning?

_This is a joke. This is a joke,_ looped in her mind. _This is a JOKE._

Nicole chewed on her bottom lip, and, yeah, the _thing_ frowned. Small sections of it folded down around its eye as it hovered in the air, reminding her of a bird caught on camera, except it was a… a… robot? Drone? Not a bird. And it talked. Talked nonsense.

Anytime now and she'd wake up. Had to. Wake up. A weight so heavy she could barely breathe pulled her lungs down.

"Nicole," she repeated. "My name is Nicole."

The thing— the _Ghost_ —fell a few inches before catching itself and bouncing back up. "Oh no. No. That's not right. You can't know your name. You can't _remember._ Can... can you? You're not supposed to—"

"Of course I fucking remember," she spat.

It recoiled.

Then, inching closer again, it asked: "What eeeexactly do you remember?"

Nicole stared at it. It stared back. And when she got up and stumbled for the light, her head reeling so badly she wouldn't have been surprised if it'd screwed itself right off her neck, it darted out of her way.

She needed air. _More_ air. There wasn't enough in here, but when she half-tripped out into the open, there wasn't near enough out here, either. So she walked. Grass, tall enough to brush her hips, tickled her wrists and bare forearms. The light clawed at her eyes. And with every step, she picked up speed.

She knew the flat top of the hill she was on. Knew the woods on that slope behind her, where she'd spent her childhood swinging sticks at invisible, but very evil, knights who'd risen from the graveyard at its base. The same graveyard she'd bolted out of just now—

Same one she'd risen from.

"Guardian!" the Ghost called after her. "Wait— where— _wait!_" It swung around in front of her, impossibly fast, the back of it turning in a wild circle. "Where are you going?"

Wordless, Nicole kept going. Hopped what'd been a tall, spiked fence once but was now no more than an awkwardly bent, rusted memory, and staggered into broken streets.

Under her feet, grass and shrubs grew from wide cracks in the asphalt. When she almost tripped over a chunk of road, the Ghost flitted to her side.

"Carefu—"

She swung an arm, blindly batting at it. Him. Him?

"_Hey,_" it— he —complained and dashed back out of range. "I… I don't know what went wrong, I swear. But if you'll just let me take you back to the city we can figure this out. We'll talk to the Speaker and he'll know what to do."

What to do? What to do with what? She half ran, half staggered, through a home she'd left a few hours ago and that now lay in ruins. And still, she hoped she'd wake. Wake in an ambulance maybe or a hospital bed and not _here,_ between the decayed walls of the tea store and the cinema with its one still standing sign, the letters and colours on it washed out.

"Guardian…."

The supermarket. Gone. Bus stop. Gone. Gas station? Good as, too. Deer bolted out of the trees and bushes that'd claimed it, their hooves smacking against the ground with dull little thuds. A flock of pigeons took to the skies, and Nicole kept going. She crossed a wide intersection, looking both ways to find nothing but decay and drooping traffic lights, and, at a jog that made her lungs burn, headed for where a four-story house ought to be.

* * *

**H**e'd messed up.

How had he messed up though? Ghost shrunk in on himself. _How_ did you get the **one** thing you were _made_ for wrong? How was that even possible?

She stopped in front of the ruins of a house sheared off at about ceiling height of its second floor. The rubble of its missing walls lay scattered, and his Guardian climbed over them. Her breathing was laboured and mostly made of gasps, and as he carefully followed through the blown-out front door, she'd had to stop to steady herself against a wall, her torso folded forward.

He hovered behind her, his shell turning around itself uselessly. _Come on. Say something,_ he thought, but couldn't yank anything remotely useful from his databases.

One deep breath later and she headed up a flight of broken stairs that popped loudly under her step, shaking off chips of concrete from their base. But they held. Once up, she crept around a wide-open gap in the floor at the top, hopped over the one after that, and then froze in front of an empty doorway.

His Guardian stood there, staring, her throat and jaw working quietly. Then her shoulders fell. Like someone had cut a string that'd kept her upright. And with a quiet whine trapped in her chest, she slunk inside.

When he tried to follow, a mangled brick almost clocked him straight in the eye. He bobbed out under it and twisted around to watch it smack into a wall.

His front plates turned a few degrees. Where did she keep _finding _those?

And what was he supposed to do now? Ghost inched up along the wall until his shell poked out over what was left of the ceiling. Below, she wandered the two rooms where the floor hadn't given out entirely, her steps small and slow. It was a pattern he recognised: someone who was looking for something. Searching. Much like he'd been. For so long.

Except he had found what he'd been looking for and she wasn't going to, was she?

Eventually, after countless rounds of back and forth over crushed furniture, she ducked into a corner, right under where the ceiling had slanted at a sharp angle. She slumped down. Pushed herself far back as she could… and sat there.

She'd traded the helicopter for what'd probably once been her home.

* * *

**G**host soon realized that his Guardian was very good at sitting still. For hours, she hardly moved and hadn't said a single word. She'd cried though. On and off. Quietly, for the most part. Easy to miss. It took until the sun finally set and the moon came up that she finally shifted enough to lay down on the floor.

The dirty, hard, _cold_ floor.

Didn't take long and she started shivering. Weak shivers, he noticed, with barely enough strength left in her to make them count.

Guardians froze to death just like anyone else did. Starved, too.

But his? _His_ wasn't going to, and so Ghost abandoned his perch and slowly slipped into the room.

Her eyes tracked him as he approached and she squirmed backwards. Away from him. _Again._ If he'd not known better, he'd have thought his core cracked. Or maybe it did. A little.

"I'm sorry," he said, quietly. So quiet, he wasn't sure she'd heard him.

She looked away, her eyes fixed on the floor now, as if not looking at him meant he'd vanish. Maybe right along with all of this.

. . .

And it _could._ He could make it go away. All he had to do was leave. She'd die again and that'd be it and— no, that wasn't going to happen.

Stubborn, his light pushed outwards, past his expanding shell and swept through the frigid air, and because he was a Ghost and Ghosts didn't own blankets or hot cocoa, he shared that, instead.

Admittedly, that confused noise his Guardian made? And how her eyes cut back to him and how she stopped shivering all of a sudden? Yeah, that. That was just a little satisfying.

A smidgen.

A tiny, _tiny,_ bit.

Though not quite as much as how she loosened her grip on the brick she'd clutched. Which he'd definitely and absolutely noticed and wouldn't have gotten smacked out of the air with.

Totally not.

Ghost sunk a little lower still, pulled his shell back together, the soft click oddly loud in the otherwise perfect silence, and settled in the air above her shoulder. And when she didn't smack him right away he decided this was where he'd stay.


	3. The Rest of Us

**The Rest of Us**

* * *

**N**icole waded through foggy fits of rest, and each time she came to— groggy and confused —the world briefly made sense. She was _home._ In her bed. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. Until, unfailingly, it wasn't.

Yesterday's ridiculous nightmare twisted around on itself. Solidified. Became real. Became truth, took everything away. Her bed. Her home. All gone.

When she opened her eyes this time, morning had crept in through the missing ceiling and poured timid light across the floor. It'd been hardwood once, the floor. With a bunch of carpets thrown on it. And dog hair. Lots of dog hair. Now it was just rubble and dust.

"Guardian? Are you awake?"

She exhaled. Sharply. "No."

Soft, electronic chirps tickled at her ear. They stuttered at the end and the Ghost… thing… fell into her field of vision with his shell pushed outwards like a bird ruffling its feathers at her.

"Funny." The blue light at his front flickered and all the angles on him pulled back together with a muted click. "Are you alright?"

Nicole clenched her jaw. "What sort of question is that?"

"Ah," the ghost said, tilting to one side and then the other.

"I'm not _alright_. How can I be alright?" She pushed up, stiff muscles pulling and pinching, and sat on her knees. "My life is… gone. My dog, my friends, my family, they're all gone, aren't they? I'm not going to wake up and this will all go away. Am I?"

"No," he said. "But if—"

"Plus, I'm hungry and I'm thirsty and if I hear one more word about some Traveler and a City I'm going to fucking scream." Bristling, and with her heart in her throat because it wanted out, Nicole got to her feet to shove past the Ghost. He danced out of the way with a quiet, distressed chirp. "So don't start with that again. I don't understand it. I don't understand _me. _Or you." She paused briefly, and then, staring at him, asked: "Where _is_ the rest of you anyway?"

He froze. "The what?"

"The rest of you. Where are _you._" She gestured vaguely into his direction before picking her way out of the ruined room.

"This _is _me," he supplied in a huff and zoomed past her shoulder to float on ahead of her. "There isn't anything missing, thank you."

_Oh._ That made… no sense. Yet it also did.

She hated it.

Grimacing, Nicole filed it away under all the other bullshit that'd been piling up, but not before giving him a look. A longer look. A _better_ look, one where she studied the blunted, four-pronged star shape of his shell around a small, dark ball at the centre. That was probably where all the noise came from, she figured, and the pale blue light on the ball, arranged like a diamond trapping a dot, was some sort of eye. He was a strange contraption, and the longer she looked, the odder he got. Especially when she realised how the individual sections of the shell weren't connected — something she'd seen last night when he'd done that _thing. _That thing she'd have preferred to have dreamt up. The one with the pool of blue light, laced with threads of bright silver that had made the cold go away and had hooked into the dimming knot for a sun she carried in her chest.

Shivering, Nicole climbed back down the broken stairs.

* * *

**H**is Guardian stepped outside the house, walked two steps, turned around, and… stared at it. Quietly. If it wasn't for the subtle rise and fall of her chest and the breeze tugging on her hair, she would have made for a really good statue.

When she kept doing that (along with pretending he didn't exist), Ghost swung a little ways off to hover in front of a small section of glass still lodged into the bottom of a broken window. He squinted at his reflection hovering behind a layer of grime — and, yeah. He was all there. All hundred percent of him. Nothing missing. No loose screws, no awol plate. Not even a _dent,_ which was a miracle considering how long he'd been out here by his lonesome. And the eagle incident? That'd been years ago and, no, you can't ask about it.

_Where's the rest of you?_ he heard her say again. The **rest**? _Pah. _

Puffing himself up, Ghost swung back around, aaaand she was gone.

Poof. Just like that.

"Guardian?" His shell shook open an inch. "Guardian! Oh for…" He whizzed back to the front of the house, his scan sweeping the ground and walls in a frantic pattern, but it wasn't until he pushed up into the sky that he spotted her again. Two streets over and climbing an obliterated barricade stoppering the town's exit.

He tumbled after her, skirting trees and jagged walls, and caught up just as she'd cleared the last slab of concrete between her and the open road.

"Please don't run off like that," he said, which got him about as much of a reaction as if he'd asked water to stop being so wet all the time.

Yeah, she ignored him. Because why wouldn't she? Why ask him for directions if she could just… hike on ahead as if she knew the place. Which she did. Know the place. _Had _known the place. Past tense. Way-back-when-tense. Big difference there, he thought, and at this rate she'd try and walk back in time until her feet bled.

So when her stomach rumbled and she idly bunched a fist into her shirt, he took a chance.

"There's a settlement nearby," he said, speeding up to fix himself to her left. "Not even an hour from here." Except she continued ignoring him, naturally, and kept staring stubbornly down the road. Though when he added, all quiet and innocent like, "They'll have food there," she finally faltered. Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth and her brow furrowed, and maybe, just maybe, it'd worked?

"Which way?"

_Yes!_

Ghost spun in front of her. "Thataway," he said, wiggled backwards a few steps, and then spun forward to hover steadily ahead. "Follow me."

* * *

**T**hey reached a bridge that'd been thoroughly pounded into the bed of a gently bubbling river — and yeah, he figured he'd phrased that a little awkwardly, but that didn't change just how little of the bridge remained. What was left of it stuck out of the water one large, bleached chunk at a time.

His Guardian stopped just short from toppling down where the road had been broken clean off, staring at the dark water like she planned to take a dive. Her jaw jumped and her fingers pumped into fists— close— open— close— open— until she finally took a deep breath and turned to look at him.

"What happened here?"

Ghost fell slightly to the side, peering around. "Here?" He sent a scan burst down along the riverbed, uncertain what he ought to be looking for.

"No. I… I mean… _everywhere_." She glanced around, her brow pulled down and jaw doing the whole jumping thing again. Oh, and her throat bobbed.

_No-no-no,_ he thought and would have really preferred to keep the chirpy little whine that came next to himself. _Please don't cry._

He inched back, joints whirring, and began juggling every single speech he'd collected for the occasion, but ultimately dropping them all one by one. They were terrible. Agonisingly awful.

"Well. Ah. Some time after you died," he said, only to regret it the moment the words had come out. They chased his Guardian right off the side of the bridge, where she slid down the slope and left him hovering up here feeling like a real idiot.

But he'd started it and so he'd finish it.

While she hopped from one chunk of bridge to the other, he told her about the Traveler. Its arrival. What it'd given humanity. Though she didn't seem to care, not even when he waxed on about the Golden Age and how people lived for three hundred years back then. She just balanced on the thin edge of some concrete and then jumped off to land on the grainy shore on the other side.

From there on, he led her along the river heading east.

The Collapse he opted to blunt a little. Gloss over. It seemed like a good idea, okay? She deserved to hear more of the good bits before someone had to get into the nitty-gritty about humanity's darkest hour.

_Someone._ Not necessarily him.

But the next bit? His shell quivered. That was his _favourite_.

"… and then, in its dying breath," he said, wiggling himself in front of her and giving a little twirl, "the Traveler made us. The Ghosts."

"There are more of you?" she asked — the first words she'd said since they'd started walking — and stopped by the water to hunker down on her haunches.

"Yeah." He paused. "Well. No. Not exactly like _me_. The only thing all Ghosts have in common is what we were created to do: to find our Guardians and to bring them back so they can continue where the Traveler left off. What it sacrificed itself for."

She scoffed (_Ouch._) and extended a hand to stick it into the water. It stayed there for a while, folding left and right as she watched the current run over her fingers. Then she stuck the second one in, cupped them together, and scooped water from the river. She was going to… drink it. Just right out of the river which could have Traveler knew _what_ in there.

Ghost pushed his shell out in alarm and darted in so close he almost bumped right into her forehead. Which… startled her. Of course it did. She thumped down on her ass with a loud huff and an odd little noise trapped in her chest.

_Whoops._ His shell bunched down sheepishly.

"_You_, are a Guardian," he continued, flicking a quick scan over the water. What was left of it anyway, considering she'd spilled most of it down her front. "And like every other Guardian, you have a spark. A spark that led me to you, and when I brought you back, it…" He rolled to the side, his processing core bouncing the next word back and forth lamely. "It ignited."

She glared. A confused glare, yeah, but a pretty convincing one nevertheless. It made him shrink a little, though he wasn't about to back off.

"Guardians can wield the Traveler's Light," he added. "Which means _you_ can wield it, too. But we'll get to that later. For now, you can just go on and drink the water. It's safe."

Yeah, right.

. . .

She threw it at him instead.

* * *

**W**ith droplets still drying on his shell, Ghost told her about the rise of the City. About the Fallen. Why they'd come, why they hated humanity so fiercely — but the Vex? The Hive? That'd all have to wait, as it turned out.

"Is that smoke?" she asked, stopping dead in her tracks, eyes fixed on a thick canopy of trees beyond an open stretch of land cobbled together from tilled fields, crops of stalky corn, and patches of vegetables.

He tilted towards it and— yes. There was smoke. A row of thick, black columns curled out from between the trees, grasping for the wispy clouds in the sky like greedy fingers.

Great.

Ghost shuttered his eye closed and sighed.

This was going poorly.


	4. Ponies and Blood

**Ponies and Blood**

* * *

**W**e carry more than we might ever think. Carry it on shoulders wide, head bowed under the weight of the unthinkable. We're built to break, some say, but we're built to _last_. Cracks and tears and bruises make us who we are just as much as the mending touch of hope and life.

* * *

"**W**e're not going _in_ there." Nicole scratched at her neck, eyes set on the tree line. She could see it clearly from all the way over here. Perfectly. The thick trunks. How they grew tightly together with nothing but shadows between them. Full of unknowns and darkness and grotesquely stitched together faceless threats. Her hand slipped forward, rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Yeah, she could see it all fine. From here to all the way over there. Even without her glasses. "Are we?"

The Ghost hung in the air in front of her, his back-half rotating slowly. A bit like her head still did, all spun down into hell from everything he'd told her.

"What? Of course we are! Someone might need help." He said all of that almost cheerfully. Like he was excited about it.

"Help?" she half croaked. Where he'd sounded excited, her voice hitched awkwardly, thrown by a sudden thought that she ought to be calling Helen since this kept getting battier and battier and Helen would like to hear all of it. They could make sense out of it together, she'd say. The strangeness. But Helen? Helen was dead.

From one heartbeat to the other, a pit tore open in her gut. Sucked that labouring heart in. She couldn't breathe through how heavy it was. Just. Couldn't. _Breathe._ There was plenty of air in her nose but it wouldn't go down.

_No— no— no— _

Windows shatter with hollow pops. Metal groans. Screeches. Cold buffets against her and for once she doesn't want to die.

"Guardian?"

She's made up her mind far too late.

"Guardian—" The Ghost's words hung up there, somewhere, overlayed by the din of a high pitched whistle. "Hey, Guardian, up here. Look at me," he insisted and so she tried to. Tried to come back. Even as darkness quivered at the edge of her vision. Tangible. Real. "You're not breathing properly, and you should definitely be breathing."

A wink of sharp light flicked over her eyes. Made her blink. Chased the darkness off. Focused her.

"In-and-out, you humans do it all the time. Yep, exactly like that. Do you need to sit? There's nothing to sit _on_— well there's the ground, but—"

Nicole folded forward, braced her shaky arms on equally shaky knees, and stared at her shoes. Which weren't even her shoes. She clenched her jaw so hard her teeth creaked.

Yay. Her eyes were all good but she still had panic attacks. How shitty was that?

At least he didn't ask her if she was okay this time. But he did hover closer than she liked, the constant soft whirring of his parts twisting not any less alien and out of place as the first time she'd woken. Good a thing as any to focus on though, right? With her eyes closed, Nicole listened to every chirrs and clicks and waited out the pounding in her chest until it'd settled into something less dizzying.

When she opened them again and stood straight, the Ghost was still there. Naturally. His eye flicked to her, then left and then right, and eventually he wobbled backwards and looked to the tree line and the smoke. She could smell the smoke now. It wasn't exactly wood in a bonfire sort of smoke…

"What sort of help do you think I could possibly be?" she asked, once her tongue stopped being a useless lump. Might as well pretend that episode there hadn't happened. "_You_ go. Do your—" She shoved her hands together in a ball before expanding them, fingers wiggling about. "—thing."

"My thing?" He turned back to her, his shell folding together, squinting.

"Your _thing_. With the light."

"With the— oh. _Oh_. No can do." He bobbed closer. Nicole leaned back. "See, Ghosts can only heal their Guardians and no one else. Which, in my case, means you."

Even without a finger to point with, the way he swooped forward certainly made her feel distinctly… pointed at.

"That sounds like a load of bull." A spark of anger flared in her gut. For… reasons. God. She was a mess. "What _are_ you good for then?"

His shell scrunched up. It clicked sharply and maybe whined a little before a frustrated grunt rounded it all up.

"Oh, I don't know, apart of the whole bringing you back to life _thing_?"

She bristled. The anger swelled. "Which I didn't ask for."

". . ." He spun away, trailing a quiet electronic whirr after him. "_And_ I can scan for transmissions and signals in the area, which there aren't any of or we wouldn't be standing here in the open. That means whatever hit the settlement is gone. For now. But there might be people left in there. Hurt. Stuck. I don't know. And maybe they'll have a beacon we can use to contact the City, tell them what happened out here and to come pick us up. Unless, of course, you want to keep walking to…" He paused briefly, swaying. "Nepal."

"_Nepal?_ That— that's—" Nicole's brain stalled miserably. "When were you going to tell me that I'm supposed to grow fucking wings?"

"Whenever it'd come up? But. No, I wasn't going to ask you to grow wings, I doubt you can grow wings— can you? I mean, I was going to find us a ship. Yeah. A ship."

"_Ugh._" Her fingers twitched. They wanted, _badly_, for a rock to fling at him, but lacking that had to contend with pumping into fists. Until each tight curl— open, close, open close —dragged the heat from her gut into her arm. Like fire licking up her bones. Exhaling sharply, Nicole splayed her fingers out. Tried to relax them. Wiggle the heat out, because that had felt weird. And kind of smarted.

The heat faded and her anger doused.

And maybe he was right? _Ah, fuck it._ What else was she supposed to do?

"I swear," she said, tucking her shoulders in and taking her first step forward. "My Roomba had more sense than you. And much better manners."

The Ghost cocked his entire shell sideways, floated along next to her, and asked, quietly: "What's a Roomba?"

* * *

**T**hey were halfway across the fields, following a dirt path lined by small, smooth rocks that'd been carefully set down at almost perfect intervals, when his Guardian broke the silence that'd followed his obviously very important (and unanswered) question.

"There used to be sheep here," she said, muffled. She'd pulled her shirt up over her nose, pinched it there to keep the smoke out, probably. Which came rolling down at them, carried by the wind after it'd changed direction. "And ponies. Shetlands. Really small ones. You-size, I guess."

"_Hey._"

Though that'd been a joke, right? A joke. She'd _joked _and joking was good. Especially after, ah, earlier. Ghost flicked his eye across the horizon, his background channel searches continuing to turn up only silence and old, decaying static. But for some threats you had to use your eye(s). Such as your Guardian having a panic attack. And eagles. Neither of which broadcasted themselves on invisible wavebands.

"It was _nice _here," she added as they passed a tractor. A broken down, ancient thing useful for nothing more than decoration, its frame flecked with colour and flowers growing in pots hanging off it. "There's still ponies, yeah?" Her voice sounded crooked. Carried a small, easily missed trembling if you weren't paying attention.

_He _was paying attention though. "Yeah."

"And sheep?"

"And sheep."

"What about dogs?" She glanced back at the tractor, before staring on ahead at the tree line and the narrow path cut through it. Around them, the smoke grew thicker. Weighed down the air. Now was a pretty bad time for having lungs, he figured.

"Lots of dogs," he said. "And cats."

_Okay, this might have been a bad idea, _he admitted the moment they were a few steps into the dark path. And not only because he couldn't pick up a single living thing on his scanners. Which he hoped would change and that he was just not being very good at this. She choked down a cough. Seriously though, he could have found them another settlement instead, one that wasn't on fire, preferably. He wasn't daft, after all. He knew what the smoke meant. Had seen it often enough. Countless times, really. Seen the seeds of what wanted to be a home, a village, a town, gutted. Back then, he'd always been helpless. Alone. Without a Guardian. And over and over he'd vowed that, one day, it'd be different. One day he'd _not _be alone and they—him and his guardian—they'd _help. _

He withered, his shell sliding down an inch, and thought that all of this? All of this kind of was terrible and he couldn't fathom where to even begin with fixing it.

His Guardian stepped on something. A twig, probably. She almost bounced off her feet when it snapped under her feet and clutched her shirt collar (still held over her nose) so tight her knuckles turned white.

But she kept walking. His Guardian didn't stop, and he'd be lying if that didn't make him proud. Even when he paused and waited, she shuffled on, right past him and out to where the trees gave way to what was left of the settlement.

Which wasn't much, by the way.

* * *

_**Y**__ou're okay. You're fine. Count to ten. You're good. _

She wasn't. Good. There weren't enough tens to count to help.

Nicole passed out from under the trees, her throat lined thickly with the oily shit clogging the air and her lungs and eyes on fire, and really just wanted to turn tail. Except she stood in a clearing maybe three-quarters of a soccer field across, one crowded with brick and wood buildings standing on hardpacked earth. Nothing rose above the tree line and most of it was either actively on fire or smouldering. Half a miracle, she thought, that the flames hadn't started eating the trees.

She threw the Ghost a sideways glance. He looked right back at her, briefly, before he shimmied off, his shell all stiff, and headed deeper into the smoke-choked settlement. Nicole followed him. And for every step she took, some through mud squelching under her feet, her sluggish mind put names to things she saw. Like it didn't _want_ to, but it _had_ to, because it couldn't keep pretending they weren't there. The flawless ground, for one, turned very flawed indeed. Tracks. Furrows. Deep ones. From vehicles, maybe. Footprints, too. Lots. Most of them too large for people and not from any animal she knew. There were also scorch marks. And bullet hole shaped… holes in brick and wood. A turned over wheelbarrow. Curtains on the _outside_, trampled and muddy. Thrown over crates, their contents spilt. Scattered papers.

Blood.

Everywhere.

She'd stepped into some. Turned out the ground wasn't muddy from rain.

Her stomach flipped violently. And when she noticed the first body, it made it all the way up her throat.

* * *

_**O**__kay-yeah-terrible-idea. You useless, rusty, __**shank. **_

His Guardian doubled over and heaved up her empty stomach. Because that's what you did when you saw a bunch of corpses splayed out on the ground or thrown against walls. Especially bloody and twisted and pale ones, with gaping holes where there shouldn't be any. They'd been there for a while.

After that, she tried very hard not to look at them.

"There isn't anyone left _to_ help," she said. "Is there?"

He turned a perfect 360-degrees, scanning the battlefield (generous, this had been a slaughter), and then sunk a few inches, pulled down by the invisible weight of his horrendous decision. He should have listened to his doubt at the start.

"No." But this wasn't _all _lost yet. Another quick scan aaaand— there, the dull static of an idle comm relay. They always tickled a bit funny. "We can still call for help though. Come on, thataway."

She trudged after him, eyes glued to his back (as he noticed when he spun around briefly), and kept herself quiet as a mouse all the way until he found the station.

* * *

**M**iraculously, the equipment they needed sat on a crowded, dirty desk in a shack held together by enough spite it'd refused to catch fire. And it was about as dated as his Guardian and oh _you stupid bulb_ that'd been a really horrible thing to think. His shell clicked together hard enough to squeeze and he had to shake it back out before beginning a cursory scan of the stack of gear.

"Okay," he said and his Guardian glanced up. First at him, then around the shack. She stood around with her arms folded, her hands tucked into them, and looked a whole lot as if she'd fallen out of a dictionary where she'd illustrated _miserable_. Dark eyes from not enough sleep, check. Light lines running down dirty cheeks from crying, check. Lips cracked, checked. Hair all over, check. Also, cold again. Or just shaking out of fear. Or both. Check. Check.

"Good news, the radio still works." Her throat jumped when he said that, regardless of how he'd made an effort to modulate his most confident voice ever. "_More_ good news, there's a coat behind you that looks like it'd fit. And a rifle."

She turned around, stared at both. When she looked back he'd interfaced with the radio and it'd come on, its tiny lights flashing in reds and greens.

"It belongs to someone," she said. "And I don't know how to shoot."

Of course she didn't. This was getting better and better by the minute. "Believe me, you'll need it more than them."

A rustle of cloth and a quiet huff told him she'd grabbed it. "How'd you do that? Turn it on, I mean. You don't have hands."

"Don't need hands to be useful. And that's me, useful." He glanced at her. She didn't look convinced, so he drooped all over again and focused on his task: getting them out of here.

* * *

**T**he Ghost had been wrong about the coat fitting. It was a few sizes too large and way too heavy, though she had to admit the weight helped. Almost comforting, really, how it dragged on her shoulders. Except nothing'd comfort the dead bodies away. Nicole sighed, threw a look at the rifle stuck to the wall, and felt useless.

While he began talking to the radio, she loitered with her hands in way too wide pockets. One of which had something in it, and when she pulled it out her stomach squeezed out a happy growl. It looked like it didn't matter how much time had past since she'd died, protein bars still looked like protein bars. She tore it open, stuffed the top of the wrapper back into the pocket, and eyed the Ghost, who'd identified himself on the radio with a long-ass number, over and over again, because apparently no one was picking up.

"Don't you like, have a name?" she asked after two bites. Gosh, that thing tasted like packed wood-chips flavoured by having been distant friends with a raspberry and yet it was probably the best thing she'd ever had.

The Ghost paused and he twisted around just enough to look at her. "Ghost."

She frowned. "You're a Ghost and you're _called_ Ghost."

"Until _my Guardian_ gives me a name, yes," he said. Tersely.

"Oh." She took another bite.

And then things went to hell.

The radio came alive. Between pops and static tearing through, a voice called out. Desperately. Nicole froze, the bar stuck between her teeth.

'_Help',_ was the first word she understood. Most everything else was mangled and distorted — and in a language she couldn't place. Something-something _'trap' _she heard though_._ And _'please'_ and _'wounded'_ and it wouldn't stop.

Trap?

She looked around. Had the walls just come closer? Nonsense.

"Slow down, slow down," Ghost said. "I can get a lock on your location, but I need to know—"

A blood curdling, stuttering cry cut the air. Not quite laughter. Not quite howl. Something in-between, torn out of an inhuman throat. It came from outside. Outside the shack. Silence swallowed the voice on the radio.

"Oh dear." Ghost backed away, his shell shrunk together tightly. "We— ah— we need to _go._ Like right now."

He zipped past her. Out the door.

And Nicole still stood there. Inside. Rooted to the spot. The stupid protein bar still in her mouth. She couldn't move. Again. _Couldn't,_ period. Anything. Outside, the laughter-howl poured together. Swelled. It was everywhere.

"**Guardian!**" Ghost called. He swung into the doorframe, twisting back and forth wildly. "Oh for— Please. I need you to follow me— because we need to move and we need to move now. These are Fallen and they'll tear us both apart if they find us."

He came back, a panicked, jagged ball of high-pitched clicks and whirrs that danced in front of her nose.

"_Nicole._ Please. We need to go. Now."

That was her name. That was her. The froze-up-idiot.

She dropped the protein bar back into the pocket and ran.

* * *

**Taffer Notes: **This is now caught up with Ao3 - so the fic will begin to update once (maybe twice) every month from now. Knock on wood, anyway.


	5. A Leaf on the Wind

It's not about the size of the... Ghost... but the size of the light in the Ghost?

* * *

**A Leaf on the Wind**

* * *

**G**host shot out into the open and Nicole barely kept up.

"This way!" he called. "Hurry."

She. Was. Hurrying. But she had legs that needed to hit the ground while he— well, he didn't. He was just a low flying blip in her vision darting into the shadows between two buildings, impossibly fast. To her left, mangled laughter-howling broke through the trees. Branches snapped. Sounded like bones, not wood. She didn't look. No time for that. Instead, she ran. Slipped between the walls after Ghost — and tripped over something. Heavy. Stiff. A pale arm flopped against the ground under her, the fingers on its hand twisted like claws.

_OhGod—_

She hit the wall with her shoulder, the shock of the impact driving sharp pain through her. Dragged herself forward. Up. Into the dark woods beyond the dead village, chasing after a faint blue light leading the way between tree trunks. Nicole stumbled from one to the other, pushed off their cold, coarse bark, her breathing sharp and painful.

She'd never run for her life before.

Who did that? Running for their life? Not her. She'd run _from_ it, yeah. Fallen into lockstep with a suffocating need to outpace it while everyone else carried on. But this was new and she couldn't fathom it. The running with nothing but a thin shirt on while a constant threat pulled on her spine and her stomach. An anticipation wanting to fill her legs with concrete and anchor them to the ground, because no matter how fast she ran, they'd catch her anyway. Whoever— whatever —_they_ were.

Especially when the forest floor began to slant _up_.

"Oh you've— you've _got_ to be joking."

A bunch of steps up and her side flared with a fierce sting. Another one and her toes dug into the detritus made of leaves and needles and dead bugs and soon dead _her_. Her foot snagged on a root or some other bullshit and she hit the ground knees first, her lungs sucking in air one painful whistle at a time.

"I can't," she managed between gasps. "I _can't._"

Ghost darted back to her. Hovered close, his eye swaying from her back into the direction they'd come. The forest swallowed every noise around them, muffled even his electronic chirps down to a mere whisper. And maybe if they didn't make a sound, this'd work out? She tried not to breathe too hard, since even that was too loud, though there was no stopping her heart going way past the allowed pace.

"Okay," he said after a moment of sticking too close to her shoulder. "I think we, ah, lost them?" He sounded convinced.

Click. Whirr.

_zap-CRACK_

Something slammed into the tree next to her. Bark and hot splinters stung her cheeks.

"Nevermind! We didn't!" Ghost turned on the spot. And vanished in a shower of pale blue light. _Vanished._ He'd just been here and now he was gone and Nicole was losing her mind again, wasn't she?

"Where— _Ghost?!_"

She pulled herself up. Crawl-ran up the slope, her knees bumping into rocks and roots and her fingers clawing at gritty earth, until two heavy shots tore up the forest floor around her. Nicole yelped. She twisted to the side until her ass hit the ground and she kicked herself up the slope with her feet.

Down below, melting from the shadows between trees, three figures approached the slope. They weren't running. Didn't _have_ to. Not with how she was sitting there, staring.

At their four arms. Each.

Four arms.

They stood slightly hunched, were covered in cloth and armour that stuck out every way like spikes — and try as she might, Nicole couldn't call them human. People. One, the shortest of them, held a rifle-looking-thing raised into her direction. Hot ice filled her lungs. If she moved, it'd shoot.

It'd _shoot_.

Shoot. Her.

Small, beady blue eyes glowed behind the rifle-thing and out from under a thick, purple hood. Not two eyes. Not four. Six.

It was going to shoot anyway. And it wasn't going to miss.

A puff of blue light winked to her left. Like bright dust swirling in a tight vortex — and out of it popped Ghost.

"Hey!" he shouted, his shell blown out wide. Ruffled. "Psakiks sacks!"

Without hesitation, the barrel snapped to the side. Fired. A red bolt struck another tree, barely missing Ghost as he rolled from its trajectory.

… and vanished again, dissipating in another wink of light.

The four-armed creatures hollered. Raised _all_ their rifles, and when Ghost reappeared in a blink on the far side of the tree, they all opened up. Right at him. Not her. He swung behind the trunk. Two bolts cracked into the bark and the third buried into the ground. Embers bloomed where they'd struck. The tree groaned, its wood tearing as fire ate it up from the inside.

It was going to fall.

And the creatures were coming up the slope. Not after them, no. Just him. The little Ghost.

* * *

**C**lose. That'd been close. _Hehehe._ Twice. So close, he'd felt the lick of heat against his core where the first shot had missed him by almost _nothing._ But, close or not, it hadn't been a hard decision to make. Hadn't taken a lot of calculating back and forth between who stood a better chance of not getting blasted by an arc bolt or a fat, heavy and very explosive slug.

Ghost materialised again, popping into view some ways further up. A deafening (and almost mournful) groan of wood bending and splintering filled the forest — and the tree he'd used for cover fell. Thankfully, it didn't land on his Guardian but it did convince her to get on her feet and run. _Unfortunately_ it didn't flatten the Fallen either though. It came down in a flurry of leaves, crashed into the forest floor with a loud, hollow smack, and slid/rolled down the slope.

Ghost twisted to throw a look at his fleeing Guardian— and dropped an inch, right as a bolt of arc energy licked through the air above him. It sent sparks dancing across his shell.

Another close one. Very. Close.

So he did the only reasonable thing: He twirled once and— _poof_ —was gone again.

Except the moment he hid, the Fallen switched targets. It didn't take a second and they opened up on his Guardian, sending her staggering between bursts of red and blue, debris kicking up around her feet.

_Crap. Crap. __**Crap.**_

They were going to gun her down and how was he going to get her back if they dragged her off? With his processing core wheeling, ghost reappeared again. Closer to the Fallen, this time.

"Wow," he called, the front and back of his shell twisting into different directions. "You're not very good at this, are you?"

They forgot about his Guardian. Snapped their weapons at him. Fired. Missed. He vanished. Whisked further down the slope. Reappeared to their left.

"Hi."

They whirled around. Weapons up and—

_Poof._

One stomped a foot down, another smacked the butt of his rifle against his friend's shoulder, and Ghost popped into view at their backs. He could see his Guardian stumbling towards the crest of the hill from here.

_Come on, come on, just a little further._

He harrumphed. Quite convincingly if he may just say so, considering he didn't have a throat.

"This is kind of fun, guys." They rounded on him. "You know, I think I could do this _all_ day."

Their mouths twisted, baring needle-sharp teeth. One looked a bit like he was grinning. Wait. Why was he—

Ghost spun on the spot. And not a second too late. Another Fallen, this one about twice his buddies' size, with thickly padded shoulders sprouting all sorts of scavenged material, stood behind him. He wore a tarnished helmet with a set of jagged horns and narrow slits alight with the glint of a row of small, greedy eyes.

How in the Traveller's name had he (and the other two Fallen at his heels) snuck up on him?!

"Ah. Crap."

The Fallen swung at him. With a sword. Yep. A sword. A _serrated_ sword, lined with thin, sharp teeth. Ghost dipped under it. Then he rolled over the _second_ sword (because of course there was a second one), except this time he wasn't fast enough. It snagged on his shell. He spun. Wildly. Fell through a world turning so fast he didn't know which way was up and down.

Not until he hit a pile of leaves, scattering them like… ah… leaves.

This was going _great._

Right?

. . .

Right.


	6. Vertigo

**F**ears bubble to the surface and a little Ghost tests his luck one too many times.

* * *

**Vertigo**

* * *

**O**ut here, the air is sweet. Rich. There's no cars. No lorries. Just a bunch of grassy knolls dotted with fluffy, white sheep under a sky that, on rare occasions, might come in blue. Thor knows to stay clear of the sheep. He's a good boy like that. Sure, he stops and stares sometimes, bushy tail a-wag and all, but she doesn't need to worry that he'll chase them. And so she wanders with his leash slung over her shoulder and her head tucked low. Trudging on. Because she doesn't know what else to do.

* * *

**T**here weren't any cars now, either. No lorries. And no sheep, because what'd once been picture-perfect hills was now an endless, jagged, torn field of metal clawing for the sky like bones sticking from the ruined ground. Nicole didn't know what to make of any of it when she stumbled up the last inches of the slope, leaving the forest and behind. Her eyes cut left. Then right. Caught, briefly, on towering metal debris her brain couldn't reassemble into a familiar shape. Nothing recognisable and _real_ anyway.

Because big-ass starship graveyards weren't a thing. Were they?

She pulled in a few hasty breaths and kept running. Slid down a sheet of ruined metal. Climbed up another, squeezing through snapped off beams leaning like broken ribs overhead. Something snagged on her coat, then her shirt. Nicked skin. Tears welled in her eyes and she bit down her tongue. Couldn't stop to cry now.

Not with— she slipped on a patch of slick metal and bruised her palms and knees as she came down hard. A panicked spike of ice leapt from the knot of heat in her chest. Snap-froze the fire. Nicole crawled the rest of the way until she reached one of the gaping cracks in the side of the wreckage. Thick wires dangled from it, like a curtain, and everything smelled of rust. Of things sharp and wrong; like rotten fuel. She swallowed down bile and grabbed one of the wires, pulling herself back on her feet. Right then it was really damn hard not to think of them as stringy guts hanging out of a dead metal beast and why her mind was going that way when it wasn't going anywhere else was beyond her.

Okay. _Okay._ Deep breaths. She'd hide. In there. That'd work. Right? It'd work. They'd never—

She threw a look over her shoulder, just in time to see a group of those four-armed Fallen come out of the forest. They didn't waste any time. Their mangled howls came after her and so did bolts of red and arcs of lightning spitting from their rifles. A volley cracked into the wall next to her, blew it up in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.

It cut her cheek. Her neck. Nicole ducked into the wreckage and kept running.

* * *

_**B**__astards._

Ghost, a leaf still stuck in his shell, zipped out over the shattered remains of a— a— ketch. Yep. That'd been a ketch once. Before it'd dropped from the sky so hard it'd gotten scattered all over the damn place. Earth's vegetation had touched the lot, hanging off it in drapes of muddy green. The whole thing was a maze. And vast. It stretched on for as far as he could see straight on ahead, mostly concentrated around the ship's main body towering over everything at an awkward angle. And right now his Guardian was in there. Inside the dead ketch. Being hunted by the aforementioned bastards who'd abandoned looking for him when he'd decided to stop playing Whack-a-Ghost. The Fallen's boss— _Captain, whatever_ —gestured with all four of his arms and his lackeys fanned out. One went into the ketch, while the others pulled ahead easily as they leapt from debris to debris, surrounding her.

He had to find her.

Had to.

Preferably before they trapped her.

Staying well out of sight, he rushed into the gnarly shipwreck, his scans on the lookout for her Light.

* * *

**S**he was lost. Didn't know what way to go. Corridor after corridor broke off around her, some gaping and open, the sky winking in from impossible angles, others choked in darkness. And she was pretty damn sure she'd just come in a _fucking circle._ Why'd she thought hiding in here was a good idea?

Nicole stopped. She turned on the spot, shaking hands grabbing uselessly at the sides of her head. They tangled in her hair. Her knees felt weak. Wobbly. Weightless vertigo washed through her. Chilled her veins. Her vision blurred, pulled tighter by shreds of purple, like the world's most atrocious migraine waiting to happen, and Nicole wanted to—

A puff of blue light gave the shadows a fright.

—scream. Well. She did. Once.

"It— it's just me," Ghost said, hurried. He hovered in close. "Hi. Come on, I plotted you a way out of here, but we need to hurry."

Nicole swallowed her heart. The vertigo ebbed from her. Curled around the knot of fire in her chest like barbed wire, its tips laced with ice.

"Any day now, Guardian. I mean, whenever you're ready." A beam of light sliced away from him, cutting into one of the blackest corridors first before almost blinding her when it swung back around. So he… was also a flashlight? Neat. A tiny and shy (but at its core absolutely hysterical) giggle chittered at the base of her throat. But she didn't move. Just stared at him.

"What?" he said. "You didn't think I'd leave you here, did you?"

The giggle died. "I thought they got you." Truth be told, she'd not thought a lot about him. If any at all, and for a moment she felt just a little guilty.

"Hehe— no. Though if we stand around here for much longer they might."

Jaw clenched tight, Nicole nodded and convinced her knees to move. Wasn't like she had a choice, and with the light leading the way, she almost thought this'd work.

Ghost, unlike her, didn't hesitate between left or right, made her believe he had an actual map to the twisting, broken corridors. He kept them away from the loud, heavy clanking of footfalls surrounding them, too. Sometimes by stopping, cutting off the light and telling her to not make a sound. She didn't dare to even breathe, especially when he jerked back and they ducked into an alcove under a gaping hole in the ceiling. While she pressed herself to the wall, Ghost vanished, blue light scattering.

_THUNK-SRRSCHT-THUNK_

The metal over them groaned. A shadow leapt over the gap. Landed heavily. Barked twisted words.

"Now," Ghost whispered close by, still invisible, and it occurred to her she'd have liked to ask him how the bloody hell he did that. Maybe she'd do that. Later. After _this._ Because it'd be okay. "Go."

She slipped under the gap.

"Left."

Followed his voice.

"Up— up— _there_. Right."

Swung right, scrabbling for purchase on a long stretch of wall where the corridor had been snapped off at a sharp angle. She crawled over shut doors— over torn open panels biting at her palms with exposed wires— and back out into the light.

"Stop."

She froze, daylight just about touching the tips of her fingers. Air tugged at her cheek, making the cuts in them flare sharply, and Ghost's soft clicks and whirrs rushed by her.

"Okay. One, two, three," he counted up there, out in the open. "And there's another one… he's also not looking. Great. Awesome. So, I am going to need you to jump over a little gap now. Don't worry, there's plenty of room to get going and once you land on the other side, just— ah— keep going down. It's a bit of a slide, but you'll be fine. Promise."

. . .

"Jump?"

"Jump. Yeah. With your legs."

Her throat clicked. Anger tickled at it.

"Ready? Go."

How was anyone ever ready for something like this? Nicole kicked herself forward and up until she was surrounded by nothing but sky. Because sometime between her trying to hide at the bottom of this carcass and now, she'd climbed it all the way to the top. Funny how that shit worked— oh no. No. _Nope._

She got three steps before her knees locked up. The _gap_ Ghost had mentioned? It fell away in front of her and down into a pit of jagged metal and turned over earth. Water had collected down there, formed a pool covered by a sheet of bright green algae.

She tried to breathe, and instead her lungs filled with thick, cold sludge.

**I**t comes at her slowly. The bottom. Nowhere near as quickly as she thought it would. But when she hits it, the world shatters apart in a flare of blinding white. Blood lines her mouth. _You can do it— _a voice calls that doesn't belong. Metal groans and tears. Water steals her breath. She forgets to scream. She always does.

**G**host appeared in his flurry of faint blue light and swung in front of her, his shell whirring frantically. "It's not far. Come on, just— jump. You got this. _Please._"

She came back from the day she'd died to the loud clap of metal being struck and the yips of twisted laughter coming to get her. She was up on that dead ship again. No longer falling down a bridge, hands tightly gripping a steering wheel. Nicole's fingers twitched into fists. Hot air seared by her shoulder.

The Fallen. They were shooting at her. Missing. Though not for long. They got Ghost first.

"Guar—" A bolt of red slammed into him, cut his words off in a burst of sparks. One moment he was here. Then he wasn't. And maybe she should have felt something other than fear. Should have maybe called after him. Maybe tried to grab him, but he'd spun off so quickly, she didn't know where he'd went.

Cold cascaded from her panic and the barbed wire wrapped around the knot of fire in her chest unravelled. It tore at the knot, bled heat into her. Pushed the cold outwards.

A haze of purple quivered into her vision. And when the Fallen opened fire again and something heavy punched into her stomach, she was gone, too.

* * *

**H**er feet hit the ground with the hollow thud of metal under them. There was an impossible vertigo bottled in her chest, pouring from her in shocks of hollow beats that threatened to crack her bones. The world, in a haze of dull purple, spun.

Nicole steadied herself, tried to get the world to stop tilting, but it all kept wobbling. It had also all changed. She wasn't up at the top any more, but down? Down where? A Fallen leapt into view, perched on the round shape of a mangled... turbine? _How the fuck did I get here? _

The Fallen took aim. _Nevermind—_

The purple haze of vertigo yanked at her, pulled her through herself. She was gone again.

She staggered, arms thrown out wide, and balanced badly on a narrow slice of metal. Sheer drops fell away around her, threatening her with jagged metal at the bottom. Though she barely noticed, not with how she didn't know what the hell was going on and why her stomach hurt so _much. _The pain was vivid. Real. Her shirt felt wet. Warm. But before she could do anything more than tilt her chin down, the haze and vertigo pulled together once more and when it released her, her shoulder smacked into a wall. Water soaked into her shoes. Squelched loudly when she took a step.

_Stop— _Why wasn't it stopping?

The vertigo gathered. Fluttered in tight like moths drawn to light. This time she managed one look down her front at the blood-soaked shirt before her next step landed on grated metal.

"Stop—" She hiccuped, loudly. Pressed her hands to her stomach. It hurt. It really _really_ hurt. "Stop, **please**—"

Once again the world blinked out around her in a wash of pale purple and Nicole's feet landed on dry earth. Shadows, lively ones, danced in close. Gathered her up in soft, cold whispers while her heart thumped desperately in her ears. All strength ebbed from her and, finally, the vertigo dissipated. Left her hollow. Bleeding. Dying.

Her knees buckled.

The world grew still.


	7. On a road of broken glass

**I**n which things aren't quite as they should be for our reluctant Guardian.

* * *

**Taffer Notes:** Hi! HELLO! I've gone back and edited the last section of the previous chapter, as I've noticed that the majority of my readers didn't pick up on what exactly was happening to Nicole. The section should now be easier to digest and understand. For those who would rather not read that bit again: She's found her Void Light, which manifested in her instinctively blinking away from the Fallen.

Thank you all for reading. I appreciate every single one of you.

* * *

**On a road of broken glass.**

* * *

**S**he doesn't know peace.

She'd like to. Really would. Even if, for a moment, she doesn't know _why_. Why the shadows choking the light from her eyes fill her with dread. Why the shreds of diluted purple seeping from her hands, as if she'd dipped them in slow churning fog, startle her. Why she grieves.

Then she remembers. It's really simple, too: She died.

Nicole stands in a well of darkness and grapples with knowing that she's dead. It bugs her, because it makes no sense. You don't die, she thinks, and then still… think about how you're dead. You die and you're gone. Done. She's lived a life convinced of that.

This? This isn't right.

When she tries to call out, her voice won't answer. It's lodged at the base of her throat, bundled in a heavy knot, and no matter how desperately she wants to scream it doesn't come loose. She tries, wordlessly, until she's out of breath.

But not everything is bound to silence, and while she claws at her throat with her eyes squeezed shut, a noise scratches at her ears. A _tap-tap-tap_ against the hollow void, like a dog— a large one —trotting nearby.

She opens her eyes again. Sees nothing. Again. It's not just the nothing of a pitch-black night, or that of a mask pulled over her eyes. There is, instead, an absence. A lack of anything and everything.

The _tap-tap-tap_ fades. She gives up searching for it. Instead, she looks down. At herself and she's somewhat glad that, at least, _she _is here. She's wearing her favourite sneakers; the slate ones with the dark red stitches and the one black and one grey set of laces. Her good old jeans, too. And the warm, soft flannel shirt, its cuffs folded in on themselves. They're the same clothes she had on when—

She died.

Nicole winces. Jerks her chin up.

A cold, jerky shudder climbs her spine and then she sees it. It's the mere idea of Light in the lack-of-all; the washed-out imprint of a white brush pressed to a black canvas. It's also very, very far away.

Nicole doesn't know peace, no. But she knows a deep-rooted yearning, grown tight around her heart. It tugs on the knot of fire burning in her chest and it wants her to walk. So she does.

* * *

_**T**ug**.**_

The first thing he felt when his sensors came back up was a quick, sharp jostle. Ghost's eye shuttered open. What'd happened? Oh. Yeah. Right. He'd been shot. Out of the air. And now he was being— dragged? He got pulled backwards, shell scraping over jagged rock until it lodged in a wooden twig, only to be yanked free again with a hard tug.

"Ow," he complained, noisily, while he gave himself a testing spin. Whatever'd been dragging him let go.

A fox, as it turned out. A small narrow thing with mottled red fur. Ghost squinted.

"What _is_ it with you damned critters." He shot up a few inches, away from its nose. Tumbled. And realised how there was something _seriously_ wrong with his shell. "You're everywhere. Now shoo. _Shoo._"

The fox told him off with a high pitched bark, leapt back, and vanished under the gnarly, dark branches of bushes that'd grown over the bits of Ketch strewn all around.

The Ketch.

The Fallen.

"Oh no. Oh _no._"

His Guardian.

* * *

**S**waths of light bloom in the absence of all, surrounding her. Too many to count. They're thick flurries of bright, shattered crystal. Like snow leaking from the globes they ought to be in, dancing and swirling and ever out of reach. At times, she can hear them whisper. Talk. Sometimes one laughs. Or cries. Though it all sounds so very far away, like she's behind a thick concrete wall and they're neighbours too noisy past midnight.

And in-between them, always parallel to her, walks the wolf. Yes. Wolf. Not a dog after all. It's massive, has a coat of pitch black fur readily soaking up the faint glow falling from the swaths of light, and sharp, brilliant green eyes. When it fixed them on her once, she'd shrunk in on herself, terrified.

She makes an effort not to think of it. Pretend she's alone, she and the strange, whispering lights. She's tried walking towards them but can't ever reach them, as if every step pulls her away — or them away from her. Like the space between them distorts. Stretches. Until her stomach flips, makes her sick.

So, rather than driving herself to insanity over and over again, she sticks to her path. The one pulling her towards the first Light, the one fixed in the nothing. It grows bigger with every step. Round. Stronger. Not by much, but it does.

She doesn't know how long she's been walking when the wolf rumbles up a growl so deep it rattles her bones.

The first light dies.

* * *

**H**is shell was ruined. Busted. Wrecked. _Kaputt._ Did he know just how badly? No, because he wasn't going to go ahead and drop it to look, not with how he still hadn't found his Guardian.

He'd (carefully) circled back to where he'd seen her last, but there'd been no sign of her. The Fallen were gone though. That was good. Or bad. What if they'd caught her? What if they'd taken her? What if— what if— what _if_—

Frustrated, he climbed high— yeah, so that made him a target in case the Fallen hadn't _all_ left, but shut up and mind your own business —and flared his shell out to push a scan out across all the ketch debris. It pulsed once, then twice, before he caught it.

Her Light.

"Gotcha…" Shell clicking back together, and hope soaring about as quick as he was rushing over to where she ought to be, he... found... absolutely nothing. Okay, maybe not strictly speaking _nothing_ nothing, because her Light signature was right here. An imprint of it. An echo. Void Light, his readings indicated.

He twirled once.

She'd _used_ it.

His Guardian had found her Light.

* * *

**T**he wolf doesn't frighten her near as much as what crouches in the Deep. It lives — is — _wants _in the absence of light. Of warmth. Of life. And it hungers. There, it spins a seeping siren song that drags at her heart with promises of ending what's begun and beginning what ought to end. It tells her it can unmake her. Remake her.

The wolf growls. Another light dies. Snuffed out with a hollow, sharp intake. Then another. This one cracks. Tears. Comes undone like a rush of moths parting, carried on silver wings — until they're shredded by a vortex built of malice.

It screamed.

One by one lights die. Some with a quiet whimper, some in wails of agony. Nicole knows that the Deep takes them. That it'll take her, too.

She runs.

The wolf keeps pace.

* * *

**B**lood. He found blood. Proooobably hers, considering it was human and, hello, there weren't any other of those around here. He was 99% certain, anyway.

_Should have recorded her biosignature, Ghost, _he thought while he stuck his proverbial nose closer to a particular patch of grass, the tips of its blades coated in muddy red. A single set of footprints laid under it. One. Not a bunch leading to them, but literally just the one, as if she'd dropped right out of the sky. Which finally made perfect sense, considering he'd been guided here by another spike of residual Void Light, this one especially strong.

His Guardian had _blinked._

He turned around, his shell sinking over his eye (not entirely on purpose, the blasted thing was acting up), and looked back the way he'd come. Addendum, she'd blinked pretty damn _far_. Not just once, either, and each blink had taken her farther away from the Fallen.

He shimmied back. Good. Great. _Perfect._ That meant two things. A, his Guardian had the stuff of champions in her, and, B, he was on the right track and all he had to do was... was…

His eye caught on more grass as he passed over it, ready to track the faint trace of Void Light to the next burst. He stopped. Turned. Scooted up in the air a little more to get a better look, and stared down at an almost perfect circle of vivid green.

Because there wasn't much _green_ elsewhere else nearby, really. The grass at the circle's edges was long and wilted, while the one inside it was short and thick. Like it was spring and it'd only just sprouted and not had to struggle— year after year —against all the crap that'd leaked from the crashed ketch.

Eight white buds poked from the ground inside the circle. Daisies.

"Okay, this is getting weird." Ghost swung back around, kicked off a bunch of queries to help him explain this all, and hoped he'd turn something up before he found her.

Since she'd have questions and he ought to have the answers. That was his job, yeah?

* * *

**H**er limbs are heavy. So heavy. It calls for her. From all around. The Light and the Deep, they sing their song until she shatters. And falls.

* * *

_**T**here._

His Guardian had collapsed beyond the ketch's impact zone, where weed-choked grass met mossy rock. That was where he found her, laid out on her side and very, ah, dead.

"Oh dear."

He dropped to a few inches off the ground and swept a scan over her. Shot to the gut (_Ouch_). It'd torn right through the shirt, left a gaping hole in it and her. And she'd bled out. That was the sort of thing that happened when you left your Ghost behind. Or when your Ghost didn't give you proper armour and told you to just throw on a too-big coat instead before running from a pack of Fallen. Guilt pinched at him. And then pinched harder just as he got himself ready to reignite the soft thrum her Light tickling at his core.

He fell lower, enough to touch the ground, and hesitated. If he could have, he'd have held his breath.

She hadn't wanted this. She'd _told_ him. Fiercely. For all intents and purposes, his Guardian had been at peace and he'd pulled her from it and into a world made of everything but. So maybe he shouldn't. Maybe he should just leave her here? Let her have the peace he'd taken from her?

Ghost shivered, sections of his busted shell sliding together noisily.

_He'dreallywantedaGuardianthough._

He looked her over again. At the half-dried pool of blood soaked into the ground under her. Her right hand, stretched out awkwardly, fingers coated in dirt. Grasping for nothing. Her left, hanging there as if she'd clutched at the hole in her, maybe to try and stop the bleeding.

Her eyes were open. Sightless. Her mouth twisted open and features stiff. Pained.

She didn't _look_ peaceful. She looked scared and desperate and he couldn't fathom leaving her like this.

. . .

She'd just have to shout at him some more later. He could handle it.

* * *

**N**icole falls through her own making and unmaking. She loses count on how often she goes around and around and around, but it feels like she falls forever. Until the warmth under her heart erupts in a white-hot blaze.

* * *

**S**he'd not realised she hadn't been breathing actual air until what felt like a fistful of it got stuck halfway down her throat. She sat bolt upright, clutched at her stomach, and blinked through the splotches and dots dancing in her eyes until they finally cleared out. All except one, the whirring one.

It all felt horribly familiar; the disorientation, the blurry vision, her lungs needing to find their rhythm again, and Ghost.

"Welcome back, Guardian."

Nicole's fell back down, her hands still clutching the shirt at her midriff and stared at the sky. They were dry. Her hands. And the pain? That was gone. Along with the darkness. The nothing. The absence.

"I died." She kept staring up at the clouds. So many clouds. Never had she thought she'd be happy to see a bunch of grey clouds promising rain, but here she was, thinking they were the prettiest things ever after all she'd seen for good as forever was darkness.

Ghost rolled into view. "Correct."

He looked a real mess, his once mostly white shell covered in black scorch marks and deep gauges for scratches. A wide, frayed crack ran along one of the triangular tips at his front. When he leaned to the side, it wobbled slightly. She half expected it to break right off and land on her face.

"Again. I died _again._ People don't die twice and... and... live."

"Guardians with Ghosts do," he supplied. And when she anger flared hotly— because how did he fucking _dare_ give her that Guardian bullshit again —his eye flicked to the right, and then the left, to her fingers digging into the ground. He backed off. Though not by much.

"Look— look, _I'm sorry._ I didn't know what to do, alright? It's my fault you're here and it's, uh, partially, my fault the Fallen got us. Got you. I couldn't just—"

"Partially?"

He froze and, bit by bit, sunk to the side and down.

"_Partially?_ This entire thing is your fault!" Nicole pushed herself up, got her feet under her, and felt her voice cracking up her throat, hoarse and hot. "Me being _here_ is your fault." She jabbed a finger at him. He shrunk back. "Me getting chased by a bunch of four-armed _things_ is your fault."

"Falle—"

"Shut. **Up**! I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear any of it I just want to go home, but I _can't_ and that's your fault too just like it's your fault I got fucking _shot_—" She took a step towards him and the anger boiled over. Drummed heat from her heart to her bones. Set her arm on fire. "—that I **died**!"

Nicole yelped.

The bit with her arm getting set on fire? Yeah. Not some pretty turn of phrase to put words to how she felt. No, it literally did just that. A vortex of flame spun from her wrist. Wrapped around her hand. Lashed out with greedy tongues, aimlessly licking at the air. One barely missed Ghost. Oh, and her coat sleeve caught fire.

She stared at it. Dumbly. A heartbeat later, the flames that'd sprung from her arm dissipated, leaving a searing sting behind. The coat kept burning.

_Why... how…_

"Take it off! Guardian— _Guardian!_ Your coat. Take. It. Off."

_Fire—ouch—__**hot**__!_

She shrugged out of it. Peeled the burning sleeve off, threw it all to the ground, and (because what the hell else was she supposed to do?) started stomping on it. Wildly. She kept stomping long after the fire was out and then gave it another twist of her heel just for good measure.

At some point, she'd started screaming.

"I think it's dead," Ghost said, all of a sudden hovering entirely too close again. She sucked in a breath and shot him a look. His shell twitched. "Sorry. Ah, are you feeling better?"

. . .

"Am I feeling better? I just... made fire. With my hand. Fire," Nicole said, flatly. And then the pain registered, made her hiss and whine and shake her hand out uselessly. The skin on it was an angry red and covered in blisters.

"You did." He scooted closer by half an inch. "Hold still."

Nicole grunted, but did as instructed, warily watching how his shell bloomed open, spilling all that blue light from it again that'd chased off the bone-deep cold last night. The sting on her hand faded — and her skin was good as new. She blinked.

"That fire, Guardian, was your _Light_," he said while she stared at her hand, pumping her fingers into a fist. He sounded… what? _Proud?_ She wished he didn't. "Or a manifestation of it, anyway. It's also how you got away from the Fallen."

"I didn't. I didn't get away." But something in her chest squirmed.

Ghost turned to her, fast enough to make the half-cracked-off piece of his shell wobble again. He didn't say anything though. Just stared.

She huffed, a sudden flush creeping up her neck, and stooped down to pick up the coat. Patting it down, she tried to corral her thoughts back together, which had run off into all sorts of unhelpful directions.

"I don't know what happened back there," she admitted after a while, slipping back into the coat. Sure, one sleeve was ruined, but a coat was a coat. Suppose. "It was weird. Everything was… purple. And felt like I was getting pulled through my bellybutton, over and over again. One moment I was here—" She gestured lamely to the left, then the right. "—the next I was elsewhere. And it wouldn't stop."

"You blinked."

"I what?"

"Blinked. Teleported. Which! Which means you're either a Hunter or a Warlock and—" His words picked up speed, like someone'd popped a hole into a dam, and Nicole threw her hand up. The one that'd been a blistered mess a moment ago. He fell silent, trailing a quiet, whiny electronic whirr.

"Stop," she said before pinching at the bridge of her nose. A dull pain throbbed behind her eyes. "I'm getting a headache…"

"Well, Warlocks are prone to headaches—"

She glared at him.

"Got it. Stopping."

Nicole grimaced and turned on the spot. Fire. She'd made fire. She'd teleported. Blinked. She'd died. She'd wandered at the edge of the Deep with nothing but a wolf and dying lights for company. And now she stood out here in the middle of a no-where that'd been her home once and was now everything but. Swallowing, she shrunk deeper into the singed coat that'd belonged to someone else once. Someone who was dead now. Someone who, hopefully, knew peace.

Not like her.

She didn't know peace. But she knew a deep-rooted yearning, one grown tight around her heart. Nicole's eyes fixed to the horizon. It tugged on the knot of fire burning softly in her chest. Willed her to walk. So she did.


	8. Detour

In which Ghost writes home and Nicole is met with another thing she's no good with.

* * *

**Detour.**

* * *

_**D**__ear Traveller,_ he recorded to himself in private while he floated at hip-height in the footsteps of his quiet Guardian. _Today, my Guardian almost got me killed. Not just once, either. Twice. See, there are a few things she doesn't quite know how to handle. Guns, for example. And without guns, whatever were we going to do against a pack of Fallen? So we ran from them. We ran from a small pack of Fallen. Like, not even ten of them._

_I'll be honest: I don't know how to feel about that._

An eery silence surrounded them, save for hushed birds and the soft crunch of her footsteps startling the local grasshopper population. The clouds overhead had cleared out, picked apart by winds that'd left them in a shredded disarray against the backdrop of a gradually darkening sky. He didn't need to tap into the City's weather broadcast to know it'd be another cold night. Which he couldn't right now anyway… because he was out in the no-where that was the European north, Scotland to be more precise, and every single com relay was _just_ out of reach.

_But she found her Light! So that was exciting. Except I wasn't around to see it because I spent most of that time catatonic in a ditch. Where a fox tried to eat me, by the way, and I swear I am not making that stuff up. Hold on— hold on— that means not only has my Guardian almost gotten me killed _twice_ today, she also almost had me _eaten_,too. Fun. Then, when I _was_ around to see her use her Light, she set herself on fire. And me almost along with it._

Ghost set his eye on his Guardian's slouched shoulders. She did that a lot. Slouch. Hm. What were the chances she'd smack him if he told her to straighten her spine a little? Astronomically high, he figured. So he chose not to and watched as she kept walking and walking and walking without saying a word, halfway falling over hillocks and rocks and whatnot and ignoring any and all paths that'd make her hike easier. Like that overgrown road they'd passed earlier, which she'd stubbornly disregarded and walked across without even looking left or right. You'd have thought asphalt— cracked or not and with rusted cars on—would have been easier to follow than over and around the stuff wilderness came made of. Her pace had slowed though, and a quick read of her vitals after he flicked a sneaky scan over her back showed exhaustion making itself at home.

Guardians may not need as much rest as the Lightless did, but they could still burn out.

Same with Ghosts. Especially ones with their shell shot half to ruin, to the point where he had to admit that if he had legs? He'd probably be limping.

. . .

Definitely limping.

But he didn't stop her. Or try to convince her to pick any other— possibly easier and safer —direction. There were any number of shelters around he could nudge her toward, but instead he kept an eye on their path, throwing it over maps in his databases. A nav point he'd recorded before they'd started running from the village (the trap) pulsed steadily at forty-two degrees south-east (closer with every step), but while he kept that in the back of his mind, it was her impossible destination that convinced him not to protest.

_Dear Traveller,_ he continued. _She's coming right at you. No, I'm not kidding. After I rezzed her (which she didn't like, not even the second time around) and she started walking, she put herself on a path that'll end right under you. I mean it. I did the math. Literally _right_ under you. Dead centre. If she could walk over the North Sea, anyway. And gets around the Black Sea, a corner of the Caspian one, and all those mountains, and and and and—_

_Look, what I'm trying to say is that it's almost like she has a built-in compass and the needle on it is pointed right at you._

He squirmed. Made his busted shell snag and grind together. The sky had gotten a little darker and his Guardian's stubborn march had found them the edge of a ruined group of farmhouses, with half of them sunken into wooded tideland that'd crept closer over the centuries.

_Dear Traveller, I'd really like to know what's going on with my Guardian. Why she remembers who she was. How she knows where you are. Oh, and how she made grass grow._

_Love, Ghost._

* * *

**I**t still followed her around; the memory of that never-ending and dark forever dotted with whispering Lights. Like the taste of liquorice after you'd accidentally bit into something that'd come without the mandatory biohazard warning. Except exponentially worse, since this aftertaste? It'd latched on to her soul, not just her tongue.

Ghost was still here too, of course. Didn't need to turn and look, she could hear him well enough, even if he'd quieted down considerably, his subtle chirps and whirrs good as lost to the breeze.

Nicole pinched the bridge of her nose. Hard. Even the headache persisted. It'd dulled to a hollow throb, yeah, but it was still _there,_ sharing space in her skull with her thoughts zipping about uselessly from one impossible truth to the other. Honestly? She kind of wanted to just lay down. Right here. On the mossy path between the crumbling remains of walls of what might have been stables for ponies once. Or maybe inside the remnants of the silo over there, which, by now, was no more than a round stub made of red brick.

But then what? Walking was the only thing that kept her grounded. Chasing that pull on her heart, that voiceless siren song that'd followed her out from the Dark? That was her track. She was the train. And no telling what'd happen if she got derailed.

Nicole sighed. And froze.

Something wasn't right. Granted, _nothing_ was, including the bit with her being alive and breathing, but this was a different sort of wrong. Like she'd forgotten to put her backpack on before heading out. Or the air conditioner stopped working at the office, leaving behind a sudden silence.

Nicole turned around.

Ghost. He was gone.

* * *

**H**e didn't _like_ leaving his Guardian.

It was the exact opposite of what he was meant to do, made to do, and what he _wanted_ to do. But here he was, on his lonesome, breaking off from her to sniff after that nav point he'd picked up at the settlement.

_Not like she'll be hard to find again, right?_ he mused. She'd be steadily trudging on towards the Traveller. _And probably not even notice I'm gone._

He hummed quietly to himself as he picked a path around knobby branches, the farm no more than a landmark at his back. Hoo-boy, this place was… _swampy._The trees were gnarly things, their trunks bent and thin and halfway covered in moss and lichen, if not whole mushroom colonies. And their roots? Tricky, apparently. Not like he'd know, he wasn't the one with the legs.

"_Shite._"

Ghost whirled around, right as his Guardian stumbled through the trees after him. His core tickled. Not because she'd slipped on one of the roots, why-ever would you think _that_. Nor because she had her foot ankle-deep stuck in the soggy earth and a look of domestic distress on her face. Though, admittedly, all the above probably contributed. A tiny bit. So, go on ahead and keep thinking it.

"Where are you going?" she asked while pulling her foot up. It came free with a loud squelch. "Ugh."

No. _Most_ of the tickle came from how she'd noticed he'd been _gone_ and then decided to come after him.

Ghost dipped a little lower and swung back and forth, looking from her to the route he'd plotted through the muddy forest. He could get giddy later. Right now he had a job to do.

"Remember when we were warned about the Fallen?"

She grimaced, but there was a nod in there somewhere while she balanced from one reasonably dry spot of ground to another.

"I pinned the location before the signal died."

She came up next to him and threw him a sceptical look.

"It's close by," he added. "So I thought I'd take a look."

"What if it's _another_ trap?"

"Then I'll be in and out so quick they won't have any idea I was even there." He gave his shell a theatrical shake, vanished, and popped back out a second later. "Just like that."

"Right," his Guardian said, not sounding onboard at all and with her eyes fixed to the ground under him. "You dropped something."

"What?"

She hunkered down, and when she came back up she held a scorched bit of… _ah_… him. In her palm. Not _him_ him. His shell. The cracked corner which'd been hanging on by no more than the Traveller's grace. His Guardian quirked a brow.

Well.

That wasn't embarrassing at all…

"That— that— that's fine. I don't need that," he muttered and set his eye back on the path, the nav point taunting him with the promise of maybe being a trap after all. Preferably, since how else was he going to end the sudden feeling of core-crushing embarrassment? "You should stay put. I'll go."

But when he floated off, he heard it right away: _Squelch — Slurp — Squelch_ and a side of heavily accented curses. His Guardian wasn't staying put. Nope. Not at all. There she was, following him still, her lips drawn in a thin, pensive line.

"What happened to it maybe being another trap?"

"You've got bits falling off you. What happens when they all go?"

. . .

"They won't _all_ go," he protested before pushing a careful scan out in front of them. "And what's that got to do with anything?"

She opted not to say and went back to being quiet. Even her footfalls shushed when they made it out of the swamp and onto more solid ground.

Five minutes and twelve seconds after he'd dropped a piece of himself, and Ghost caught a trace of life on yet another pre-emptive scan. Nothing big enough to cause alarm though or startle his Guardian with. Most certainly human, too.

So he took off to scout on ahead.

* * *

**G**host zipped up a rocky incline without warning and dipped out of sight. An incline she had to climb, which added more strain to her already tired legs and made her knees ache. Honestly, she'd never walked that much in her entire life. Ever. Especially not in a pair of stupid, soaked shoes. She should have just kept going, back at the ruined farm, but no. Instead, she'd decided to go after the wink of tarnished white she'd seen flit into the trees. Like the absolute loon she was.

_God_ was she hungry. Tired. Cranky. All those things that called for a hot bath and maybe a Netflix binge.

She grimaced. Where the frelling hell had Ghost gone?

Down the slope, sat a tent. More of a lean-to, really, made of tarp and sticks, with a fire pit full of ashes in front of it. An iron pot lay tipped over in the ash. Plastic and metal scraps littered the ground, and opening up on the other side of the camp was a narrow path carved through the forest. Like a deer trail. For very large deer.

Or for that thing parked next to the tent. Nicole squinted at it as she slid down the steep slope. It looked like a… no, it didn't look like a motorbike. Motorbikes had _tires._ If anything, it resembled a swoop bike right out of Star Wars. Somehow, that didn't surprise her anywhere near as much as it probably should.

The bike-thing was beat up, the paint on it chipped and worn and its seat covering mostly peeled off. But it had her attention, beat up or not, and if Ghost hadn't suddenly backed out of the tent, she might have gone to take a closer look.

"It's alright," he said, sounding oddly subdued. He kept his back to her. "We're not going to hurt you."

Curious and wary, Nicole frowned and leaned to the side to peer under the tarp, where she found a child staring back at her. A girl. Hip-sized, at best, with dirt caking her face and a muddied mop of straw-coloured hair. She knelt on a sleeping bag and held a small, black box clutched in her lap.

Next to her, propped up on the tree the lean-to had been built against, laid a body. Dead. A corpse. Nicole could tell, because his skin was pasty grey, his mouth agape, and his eyes wide open.

Her stomach did a quick and violent somersault.

The girl said something — words Nicole didn't catch between taking a step back, swallowing down some bile, and not having the slightest clue what language she'd said it in.

Ghost wasn't deterred though. He swung his eye from the girl to her and back, before replying with a nonsense pile of words of his own. They were kind words, though, said softly and with a singsong lilt.

At the mention of something-something-værge, the girl's eyes snapped to Nicole. Didn't take another second and she was on her feet and rushing out of the tent. While Ghost dipped sideways and out of her path, Nicole wasn't anywhere near that lucky, what with how she stood there, staring dumbly as the girl ran right into her to wrap her little arms around her hip in an almost vicelike grip.

* * *

**O**kay. So he'd found yet another thing his Guardian didn't know how to cope with. Next to her Light, guns and Fallen and the whole dying bit. Kids. She stood motionless with her arms awkwardly lifted, a look of absolute terror on her face and her mouth working on a convincing fish impression. Open, close… Open, close…

It took a few seconds before her arms hitched lower, like she wanted to pat the kid's shoulders but didn't quite know where to start. So they kept hovering.

"What— what'd you _tell_ her?" she asked, voice brittle at the edges.

"That she doesn't have to be scared any more, that sort of thing. And— ah—" He paused and filled the moment of hesitation with another sweep of the camp. Supplies. A radio (currently pressed to his Guardian's back because the kid held on to it for dear life). A sparrow.

_I can totally work with that. We are going places from here on out._

"And," he added, sheepishly. "I might have mentioned you're a Guardian."

Her jaw jumped. Though at least she finally rested her hands on the kid's back. Baby steps, right?

"What? Little ones _love_ Guardians and she's already feeling better knowing you're one. See?"

She didn't seem reassured. In fact, Ghost didn't like the look on her face one bit. The one she got when her eyes cut to the tent and then back to him. It was all manners of dark and… what? Guilty? Was that guilt of all things, really? He sunk an inch. His shell snagged again when he tried to fold it inwards, jamming uselessly.

"He was the one who warned us, I think. I mean, I am pretty certain. Him and the kid were either survivors who made it out of the settlement, or they ran into the same trap as we did and managed to escape. Either way, he got hurt. Broke his leg, couldn't treat it properly, and it got them stuck here. Until, well— ah—"

"He died."

"Yeah. Look, we should load whatever we can on the sparrow and get out of here."

"Sparrow?" She looked at him, startled, and he could almost hear the gears in her head turn. If she had gears, anyway, which she obviously didn't since she was human, but it wasn't his fault humans of old had come up with the weirdest sayings. Visionary ones, if you thought about it. But _weird._

"Sparrow, yes. This—" He swung over to where it lay dormant on the ground. A cursory scan of the electronics and machinery told him it was still in working order. Sort of. "It's missing most of the onboard electronics, but it has breaks, throttle, and steering. What else could we possibly need?"

His Guardian's eyes flicked left and right.

"I don't know. Maybe new shoes?" She glanced down at the kid. Or her feet. Or both. It was all kind of adorable. "Yeah, new shoes."

* * *

**N**icole didn't get new shoes or even socks, but she did get help with gathering up whatever Ghost thought would be useful. Literal help. One moment a pack that'd been lying in the tent (which she didn't want to go anywhere near of), the next he… projected dancing motes of blue-white light over it. And it vanished.

Yep. Vanished.

It was _gone._

She stared, her mouth probably hanging open, and one hand lamely holding on to the _sparrow's_ steering handle. Humming a quiet, purposeful tune that tickled at her with a hint of familiarity, Ghost zipped over to the back of the sparrow — and the pack reappeared out of the same flood of light, slotted neatly in place atop the gear and whatnots she'd already strapped to it.

"All_right,_" he proclaimed, cheerfully, and turned to look at her. When all she did was stare, he froze. "What? I didn't drop something again, did I?"

"No. No, but… how did you…" Nicole pointed at the pack. "Do that."

"Oh. Transmat! Without an active storage link I can only buffer smaller items and my capacity is limited—"

"Holy shit," she blurted, interrupting him mid eye-flicker.

Ghost, all hushed now, leaned to the side, looking at the little girl standing close by, that box (a radio, she'd learned by now) still in her hands. When he looked back at her, the top of his scorched shell tipped forward in what resembled a scolding frown.

Nicole blushed.

"Aaas I was saying: transmat," he continued while moving up and around the sparrow, more light flicking over it. "Pretty neat stuff. With a big enough buffer we can even transmat _people._ It's how we get our Guardians to and from their ships."

The sparrow shuddered. Whined up a pitched noise like a car engine trying to whistle— and sprung a few inches off the ground. Which was brilliant and all, but had he just said they had _beaming_?

"Can you do a Scottish accent?" she asked, putting on hers as thickly as she could while her mind spun off in tiny, fragmented loops. The headache was gone. Fantastic. But now she was dizzy from all the impossible shit laid out in front of her again. Like _beaming_ and _swoop bikes_ being an actual thing. At the same time.

Bunch of hundred years ago she'd have been thrilled.

"Wha— what? I mean. Maybe? Sure." He twisted around to face her. "_Why?_"

She opened her mouth and promptly closed it again when someone tugged on her coat. Yeah, alright. Maybe right now wasn't the best time to go on about _Beam me up, Scotty,_ no matter how tempting and how much she wished she could stop thinking about the dead body so very, very close by. Or about that orphan who'd attached herself to her coattail. Literally.

With a sigh, Nicole stooped down enough to grab the girl around the waist and hoist her up on the sparrow. "Hang on tight," she said, which Ghost readily translated and the girl immediately did. Thought she never let go of the radio. Nicole frowned. The girl was a scrawny mess, no more than skin and bone and hair and puffy clothes. But not a single tear and maybe that was what twisted her heart the most.

"What language is that anyway?"

"Scandi," he said. "It's— ah —a mix of old Scandinavian languages, like Swedish and Finish and Norwegian. Came together after the Collapse. So, uh, you should probably _push_ the sparrow out of here. Lots of trees."

Nicole scoffed and leaned over the steering handles to set her hands against them. "Way ahead of you. I'm good only dying twice." When she started pushing, carefully, the sparrow slid forward with almost no resistance.

And that was how she spent what was left of the day. Pushing a sci-fi bike through a forest and trying her hardest to ignore the tug on her heart that wanted her elsewhere.

Oh, and in her awfully soggy shoes.

* * *

**Taffer Notes: **I'm very likely taking weird liberties with my interpretation of what Ghosts can do. From what and when they can transmat, to what they can create for their Guardians. The system in the game always puzzles me a little, and I like to make sure that Ghost can't simply create things or transport just about anything for Nicole since it feels like it'd remove the potential for tension.


	9. Rubik's Cube

**Rubik's cube**

* * *

**D**usk had come by the time they made it out to the forest and found something resembling a clear road. It left the sky bruised with heavy purples and slices of angry red, and maybe on any other day (and a few hundred years ago), Nicole would have thought it looked pretty. Today all it did was tell her they'd be out of light soon.

And still, she didn't feel like driving. Clear(er) road or not. Ghost didn't argue, and the girl they'd picked up? She hadn't said a word since they'd left the camp behind. Stared, yeah. Lots. Right at her. No shame or anything, and each time she'd wondered if she should say something, only to decide not to.

So silence it was and Nicole didn't want to think about what it'd take for a child to learn to hold still for so long. They were meant to move around. To be loud. Annoying. _Lively._

Not hushed husks.

It was horrible, okay? And walking like that? With tension in her shoulders and a constant itch at the back of her neck? Nerve-wracking. Even the most innocent of bird calls kicked her heart into gear, every single one of them just waiting to warp into twisted laughter coming to chase her again. She shivered. God, she never wanted to see these things again. Ever.

When she'd stopped once, her knuckles white where they gripped the sparrow, Ghost had inched up next to her and thrown a look at the same shadows she'd been staring at because a leaf had rustled at her funny. He'd swung around to her, the blue glow of his eye giving a few hesitant flickers and reassured her that there weren't any Fallen around here. That he'd been keeping an eye out.

She'd pulled her shoulders up, kept pushing, and wondered why he'd been whispering if there wasn't anyone around. Besides, the sparrow made enough noise to ring any man-eater's dinner bell from ways off.

Wait, did the Fallen eat people?

... was there anything around that _did?_

That'd been a while ago, and it took until the shadows grew long enough to hide monsters in for Ghost to swing ahead of her and put himself in her way.

"I have a plan," he announced.

"Good for you."

His shell scooted forward in a frown. Yeah, that was definitely a frown.

"Fine, let's hear it. What's the plan?"

"The _plan_ is we get off the road in another two-hundred meters and—" He paused and stared at her, a curious (and careful) chime dinging off him. "That's six-hundred-and-fifty—"

"Ghost," she interrupted him.

"Yeah?"

"I _know_ how meters work."

"Oh. Okay. Good. So, in two-hundred meters we'll cut north. North-ish. There's an old brewery down that way, something the Fallen won't care for, but I bet there's still enough of it standing that we can stay there for the night."

Nicole rubbed at her nape. Squeezed. She'd _like_ to rest, but... Her eyes cut to the girl.

"Will it be safe there?"

Ghost's shell twitched in a shrug. "I can't say. I _hope_ so."

"Since when do computers _hope_? Don't you like, I don't know, calculate odds, get all specific."

"_Hey,_" he went in a huff, his shell flaring out. "I'm not— I'm a _Ghost_, not a… a… handheld accessory."

"So what, you're not like, an AI?"

Ghost hesitated. "Not exactly. I _hope_ and I guess. And I dream, too. Computers don't dream." He sounded almost smug when he said that, which did its part distracting her from how this was all still very odd.

Box of mad frogs odd.

She wondered if she'd ever get used to it.

"Fine. Brewery. I know what brewery you're talking about. So—" Nicole began pushing again and Ghost hovered ahead with his eye turned to her. "—we hide in the brewery. I get some sleep. _She_ gets some sleep." She jerked her chin to the girl. "And then what?"

"_Then,_" he started, "which'll be tomorrow, we head to a Vanguard emergency relay. There's one half a day from here, and once we get there I can call for someone to pick us up."

"Vanguard?"

The back of his shell gave a quick, albeit jerky, spin. "Yep! Okay, so the Vanguard—"

And off he went, eager and so quick Nicole could barely keep up with his explanation and history lesson while she led the sparrow, half her mind busy with being wary of the shadows stretching for them, ready to grow teeth.

* * *

**T**hey slunk into the brewery like a trio of thieving mice.

Not much of it was still standing, and what was had thrown in the towel after being put in the ring with time. And, fair was fair, it was all kind of pretty.

Nicole pushed the sparrow through a gaping hole in one of the brewery's bigger halls. A section of roof facing west had come down, torn a good chunk of wall with it, and left ample room for the sinking sun to come spill in after them as she inched carefully forward.

Not like all the sneaking was doing them any good, considering the sparrow whistle-hummed steadily on. A sound that grew louder in here, bouncing off the walls and wooden pillars — and the large brass bell things spaced out in front of them. Nicole had absolutely no idea what they were called, but that was where whiskey was made. Sort of. Kind of. Honestly, while she'd always liked drinking the stuff, she didn't have a lick of an idea how it was made.

Except it was supposed to be stored in barrels, right? There weren't any barrels. Just the brass bell things thickly covered in plants, the light of the fading sun gleaming off the exposed patches of it like molten gold.

Pretty.

Ghost darted up high, swirled on the spot once with a scan sweeping the place, and then darted back down to guide her through a maze of walkways and pillars.

She ended up parking the sparrow at the far end of the hall. Right under a tarnished wood and copper plaque with a whiskered fish lounging on the rim of a stout barrel. The writing under it had faded, but she knew what it'd been called: The Smoked Catfish Brewery.

Come to think of it, she could really do with a bottle right now. Forget the ice. She'd drink it straight. Or was that neat?

Sighing, Nicole dropped her hopes and dreams of whiskey burning down her throat, and hoisted the girl off the sparrow before dumbly staring at the buttons laid out on its centre console. None of them were labelled.

"How do you turn that thing off?"

"Oh. Just like that," Ghost supplied as he swung by and, with a flick of light from his eye, choked off the engine.

"Ta."

* * *

**H**is Guardian opted not to sleep on the naked floor this time. That one night after she'd risen had been enough, he figured. She pulled the gear from the sparrow, laid out the lone thick bedroll they'd salvaged, and then tossed one of the normal blankets a little off to the side of it.

Then she pointed at the bedroll and then at the kid, before folding her hands next to her head and leaning it to the side in a _You sleep here_ sort of gesture. While that didn't need translating, the kid didn't stay there for long.

The moment his Guardian started walking back the way they'd come (meaning: out into the falling night), the kid got up and made to follow. And so did he, except he was already up. Up in the _air_. Duh.

His Guardian turned around and threw them both a look that didn't need words to get the message across, either. They slunk back.

Turned out his Guardian knew how to build a campfire. Not just some wood thrown together in a pile, either. Slowly floating around the finished structure, Ghost eyed the neat stack, bobbing over his Guardian as she knelt on one end getting the fire started. _Clink-sssslink_ the flintstone (also looted from the camp) went a few times before the first sparks flew — and by the time he'd rounded the pyramid thing three times he almost clipped her shoulder as she shot up to avoid getting burnt.

Then she raided the supplies for food. Well, _they_ did. The kid and her. Not him. Ghosts don't eat. Sometimes he thought that was pretty tragic.

"What's your name?" his Guardian asked while exchanging rations, adding "I'm Nicole," at the tail end and tapping some plastic-wrapped dinner against her chest. He didn't need to help translate that.

"Bjarte," the girl blurted, putting on a toothy grin. She missed a bunch of teeth and the rest weren't looking too good either, but that didn't make the bright smile any less genuine.

His Guardian barely returned it though. She tried, sure, with the corners of her lips twitching briefly — but none of it touched her eyes. They were just tired. So tired, Ghost was surprised when she took her time to tuck the kid into the bedroll and then didn't just pass out herself.

Rather, she scooted over to the blanket she'd tossed down, sat on it with her legs crossed under her, her back all slouchy, and…. stared into the fire.

_Pop._

_Crackle._

Hoot. (That'd been owl. Not the fire.)

Her chin snapped up, eyes catching on the plaque on the wall and then darting to the blown out windows through which the owl had hooted at them.

She puffed air from her nose, leaned to the side— and still didn't fall over to sleep, pulling over one of the packs instead so she could sift through it with the same gusto Hunters attended mission briefings with.

"How do Guardians deal with it?" She didn't look up when she asked it. And for a while she let that open ended question hang there as if she expected him to be able to read her mind.

Well, he couldn't.

Not _yet._

. . .

Wow. She was going to be _thrilled_ about the neural link, wasn't she? Absolutely delighted. (And that was sarcasm.)

His Guardian placed something in front of her. Bright red electrical tape, to be exact. Then she went back to fishing and adding to her question.

"The dying. With being dead."

"I…" _Have absolutely no idea._ He paused and sunk an inch closer to the ground, just in time for her to throw him a look and wave him closer with a twitch of her fingers.

Wait. _Wait._

She'd waved him _closer. Closer._ Ghost's shell tried to puff out cheerfully, the keyword there being _tried, _since he didn't let it. Though he did zip over in a hurry, fast enough to spin off a little too far before he managed to catch himself by her shoulder.

Right when she placed a squished tube of glue next to the tape — and only a moment before she dug the tip of his shell out of her coat pocket.

She'd kept it.

_She'd _kept_ it._

His Guardian had kept the bit of his shell that'd fallen off in the swamp, and it didn't take the processing power of a Ghost's core to analyse the situation and come to the conclusion that she wanted to put it back on.

He cleared his entirely conceptional throat, hoping that'd mask the startled chirp of his electronics not shutting the heck up.

"I thought you…" She held the piece pinched between her fingers, a small frown pulling down her mouth. "I don't know. Might want to have that fixed. So it doesn't— ah— rain in there? I guess?"

He swung himself in front of her. Slowly. Didn't want to spook her all of a sudden and lose another end rather than having that one put back.

"Does it hurt?" she added after a moment, a glance skipping between him and the piece of shell. Her brow furrowed. "I should have probably asked that a few hours ago."

"No, it doesn't. Hurt. There's no hurt."

"Oh. So you don't feel pain?"

Ghost hung back an inch in a show of a lazy sort of recoil. "No — I mean _yes_. Pain is a thing. I feel it when I get damaged, like when I get shot or jabbed." He leaned forward again and added, melodramatically, "Or when my Guardian hits me with a brick."

Her jaw jumped.

"But that's all just sensory data meant to tell me I'm in danger."

"So like— any sort of pain."

He paused. "Point. Except my shell is more like— uuh— imagine if you could feel it if someone cut a hole into your shirt and when they're done cutting the pain goes away again? It's like that."

_Sort of._

She stared at him blankly for a while, until a look of sudden determination crept into her features and she held the chip off his theoretical shoulder up in front of his eye. "How do we do this then?"

Awkwardly, that was how.

See, no one'd ever touched his shell before.

Up until the moment he gently set down in his Guardian's right palm, anyway. What? Ghosts didn't generally make a habit of going around and rubbing up against people for a bout of scratches. Unless you were… what was her name again? That Ghost with the— the—

His Guardian's fingers carefully locked against two of the protruding tips of his shell at the back — and his thoughts locked in place with them.

Right. Okay. Cool. Here he was, briefly remembering the last time something'd grabbed him. It'd had _talons. _And it'd been mean and not gentle and why was he thinking about that damned eagle right now, this was really not the time or place.

Especially because the _place _was his Guardian's hand.

The bottom half of his shell just about fit into it, and even as she tightened her grip a little and restricted his movements to rotating his upper sections and core, she was gentle. Hesitant. And busy holding him at an angle that pointed him at the curve of her shoulder, from where he watched her animated shadow thrown against the old brick wall. The fire gave it a life of its own. Made it dance.

Bit like his core was trying to dance from its shell and wobble off to hide under a piece of heavy machinery. He didn't though. He got it together like the Ghost he was and not some wimpy quarter-servitor.

Yep. Totally got it together. Absolutely.

Ghost blinked his eye shut. Not for long, mind you. Just for a moment between moments, that space between two human heartbeats. The exact time it took for a thread to unravel. It was bright. Warm. Woven from a tangle of the Traveller's light and the promise of finding a thought at the end of it. One he'd dropped long ago and forgotten.

Like they all had when they'd been born.

"Huh," his Guardian said, cryptically. Yanked the thread away from him.

His eye snapped open and he blurted an entirely composed: "What?"

"You're… warm."

. . .

Then she made it worse. She set a finger against one of his shell sections. Nudged. It was a careful and soft nudge, but it was a nudge anyway. "And all wiggly."

"Sowhy'dyouaskaboutthedying?"

The _wiggling_ stopped. "Bless you?"

He twisted around inside his shell, the pressure of it being held in place an odd combination of unfamiliar comfort and sensory confusion. Yep, it was a miracle he could still think straight, what with all those error codes getting in the way and needing dismissing. He'd just mute them all. Yep.

He'd managed to turn enough to look up at his Guardian having moved on from poking at his shell to squeezing the tube of glue.

"Earlier," he clarified. "You asked about how other Guardians deal with dying."

She squinted at the tube of glue and shrugged. Which jostled him a little, but that was fine. All of this was fine.

Honestly, he kind of liked it.

Okay, okay. He _liked_ it.

"I'd just wondered how anyone copes with it? At all? Being dead." When she said that her voice took on an edge it hadn't had before. Least not for a while. The hint of a tremble waiting to happen, though it didn't translate into how steady her hand was as she started lining the edges of his shell with glue.

"Dead and trapped."

Ghost froze. Grew even stiller then he'd already been, sitting in her hand like that.

"What do you mean with… trapped?"

She set the broken piece of his shell down. "Uh. Trapped in the dark? And I mean really, _really,_ dark. Like it's-got-eyes-and-it'll-eat-you-dark if you step into it. And the light." She paused. Realigned the shell to fit the break better. "Lights. The weird lights. _Gosh,_ will you stop moving?"

"... sorry, I'm just—" Ghost squirmed awkwardly, tried to shift his shell so he could look at her better. She was pale and her eyes unfocused, even as she kept pressing down on the break. "—_really_ not sure what you mean. I've heard a Guardian describe her death like nodding off while watching a vid and coming to again after having missed all the best bits. Something like _that_. Not anything like being trapped."

She exhaled slowly — and equally slowly fixed her eyes on him, as if refocusing them involved a lot of work. "I was stuck there for days. For _forever._ That's what it felt like, anyway. Started with being just dark everywhere. I couldn't see a thing except myself and there was a… a wolf?"

"Excuse me?" Ghost shuttered his eye in a confused blink.

"Mhm. Then, like halfway across the world, a light came on." His Guardian let go of the break. "I think it was singing? Calling for me? It wanted me to walk to it, so I did, until more lights appeared. They were all around me and much, much closer. Some were just a few steps away, but I couldn't actually _get _to them. As if I was only allowed one path and that was forward, to the big one and past all the other lights. They were whispering and laughing and they felt alive? Least until the darkness began… popping them like balloons. Breaking them. One by one."

A shudder ran through her, and Ghost found himself lifted to about eye level to be turned this way and that like he was a teacup she'd just fixed a broken handle on. Which was fair. A teacup was about as useful at processing what she was telling him.

"That's when I started running," his Guardian added and carefully perched him on her knee before pointing a finger at him. "Stay," she said, quietly.

Ghost did as told.

The tape came next, and while he still tried to put together the pieces of her story, she ripped strips off it and stuck them to the back of her hand.

Honestly? He'd almost dismissed right from the start, what with there being reasonable explanations for seeing a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Seizures, for one. Oxygen deprived brains liked to seize. And sometimes its cells refused to go quietly and made a show of it instead. Hallucinations. That's what they were. Didn't matter how desperately people wanted to find a more profound meaning in them, at the end they were no more than wild misfirings of a dying mind.

And time? Seconds. Minutes. Hours. _Years._ They had no meaning between neurones.

You could live a lifetime in the blink of an eye.

His Guardian hunched over him, her hair cascading around him like a curtain. Good thing he wasn't ticklish, yeah? Then she grabbed the damaged piece of shell and started slapping bright red electrical tape over the glued together break.

. . .

So. Yeah. Anyway. He'd have liked to dismiss it. Tell her it'd been nothing more than a bad dream, that there wasn't such a thing as the Darkness eating at the Light. But then she'd had to start walking right at the Traveller the moment she'd put herself back together earlier today.

It hadn't been a dream. While he'd went looking for her the second time around, she'd lived a nightmare. That wasn't how this was supposed to work…

"I think," he said, carefully, "that was the Traveller."

She paused mid-tape-application. But didn't make a sound.

"The Light. The one calling for you. You kept following it even after I brought you back."

The tape went on, though her fingers were shaking now. Enough to have her abandon the rest of the tape and lean back.

She nodded.

Ghost kept sitting on her knee for maybe a moment longer than he really had to before pushing off. Flexing out each section of his shell and then giving it all a testing twirl, he never took his eye off her staring at him like she waited for the answer to something as complicated as the meaning of life.

Well.

_Theoretically_ he could tell her exactly that. She was a Guardian, after all. And like him, she had a meaning. A destiny, if you will. It just wasn't the one she wanted.

And maybe it wasn't even the one he'd expected either.

"Try not to worry," he said, and okay it was about the worst advice next to _Don't_ worry, but he wasn't about to add fuel to the fire with another history lesson. The one about the Darkness and the Collapse and whatnot. "Our first stop when we reach the City will be the Speaker. If there's anyone who can help it'll be him. He'll know what to do. What it all means."

"The _Speaker,_" she echoed, sounding about as convinced as he'd admit to if anyone pressed. "You keep mentioning him."

"He talks to the Traveller. He _has_ to have answers," he argued, though probably more for his own sake than hers if he was going to be honest with himself there for a second.

"If you say so."

"Yeah. Yeah, I do." _C'mon, sound a little like you mean it, champ._

"Right."

"_Great,_" he blurted and allowed himself a moment to sweep their campsite with a halfway critical eye. Most of him was busy getting overwhelmed by all those unknown variables his Guardian had come with. And it bugged him. Immensely. And the rest of him wasn't happy about how the light from the fire was going to be visible through the ruin's windows, but he wasn't about to ask to have it put out. If he was going to get her and their little surprise cargo (who slept like a log) to the City, then his Guardian needed rest. She wasn't going to get any resting done while freezing.

"We'll have this sorted out in no time, you just wait and see. Now roll over and sleep, I'll keep an eye out."

Her brow furrowed and she stiffened.

"Just in case," he clarified hurriedly. "Nothing is going to find us here." _I hope. Oh for… fingers would be nice. Could cross those. _"And, ah… thanks."

"What for?" she asked while tossing the glue and tape back into the pack before finally huddling up inside her oversized coat.

He tilted his shell and flexed out the recently remodelled tip. "Patching me up."

"Oh. You're welcome," her tousled hair replied — since she'd good as vanished into the coat, with nothing but the top of her her head poking out. Also, she'd said it all _ye'r_ welcome and he _really_ couldn't wait to introduce everyone else at the Tower to his Scottish Guardian. They'd love her.

"I guess you don't sleep?" she added after a while of huffing and turning this way and that in a probably futile attempt on getting comfortable on the blanket between her and the concrete. She'd stuck her head out again though and was eyeing him. "You're not just going to… nod off?"

"I _do_ sleep, but I am not going to nod off, no. I have a good few hours left before I'll need to recharge."

"Recharge? Like… are you going to plug yourself in somewhere? Or—" She yawned. "— fold out secret solar panels?"

"No." He curbed the urge to groan. Kinderguardians. Seriously. "I nap. Just like you. Well, sort of."

"Hm," she stated, staring at him. Ghost puffed his shell out a little. Preemptively. "Sooo I don't need to wind you up?"

"What- _**no. **_I'm not a windup toy."

The corners of her lips kicked up hard enough to nudge the smile all the way up to her eyes. "Are you sure?"

"Ha-ha. Very funny. Go sleep."

* * *

**T**he night sky holds little to no secrets any more. Not to him anyway, the Ghost circling the soft glow of a fire leaking from dead stone. He's flown under that same sky for almost all of his life. Searching. Dreaming. And what little time he's not spent under it, he's spent beyond it. Past the satellites. Past the debris. Past the cracked open ships and stations that wink back at him in poor imitation of the stars they sit with. It's their purgatory. A thin line between the depth of a cold forever and an end in fire.

He's watched a lot of them fall.

And he can name them. The ones that have come down and the ones still up there, from the satellites to the wreckages and the constellations and planets. With the right charts, he knows where all of it is at any given time.

But he doesn't know his Guardian.

Doesn't know her fate. _Their_ fate.

There's no map. No instructions.

But he'll get there.

* * *

**Taffer Notes: **If you want to see some art of Nicole and Ghost, go hop over to my Tumblr, tafferfield. I got some there!


	10. Before the Storm

In which we give Nicole a few distractions and Ghost gets cozy.

* * *

** Before the Storm**

* * *

_**D**__ear Traveler,_

… _I'm very tired and my Guardian is about to wreck her first sparrow._

Ghost winced. It wasn't more than a miserable, exhausted twitch that barely moved his shell, and came with yet another warning blip that his reserves neared empty. He dismissed it. Like he'd done all the ones before, too.

_Which is fine,_ he continued in the privacy of his core. _They all do that. Wreck their first sparrow._

His Guardian yelped. Threw her weight left. Too far left. Way too far left…

_Right?_

And that was how, under another dreary sky (because the weather up here was about as decisive as a Hunter in the cape shop), his Guardian got her sparrow to pivot at a sharp angle, her entire weight hanging off on one side. The relatively open and wide stretch of road they'd found to practice on suddenly wasn't anymore. Wasn't. Period. Not wide enough and definitely not clear enough. Spitting out an offended whistle, the engine compensated for the abrupt change in direction best as it could. Ghost begrudgingly admitted that it had a surprisingly tight turning radius, especially for a rusty old bucket like that, but — oh _no._

Like a needle on a compass that'd found it's north, the sparrow stopped spinning. Except _north,_ in this case, was a fallen tree sticking out into the road. Fallen, but not dead yet with thick bushels of leaves still stuck on its branches.

"Watch out!" he called. Next to him, Bjarte snapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes open wide.

His Guardian avoided the tree. Well. No. The _sparrow_ did. Narrowly. _She _got clipped by a bunch of branches — _TWACK_ "OW!" _TWACK-TWACK_ "Ohferfuck'ssake." Until there she went again. Too much throttle. Too little control. She yanked the sparrow away from the tree, its exhaust blowing hot air down its length. Made leaves scatter. Set some on fire.

Oh this was going well, wasn't it?

And then she headed straight for a rusted mound. A bus, Ghost's processing core supplied wearily. The wreck didn't look like it'd been left here ages ago, rather it might as well have grown right out of the ground. All part of the scenery — and no — _nope_ — he really didn't want to watch his Guardian go splat against it.

So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of: He turned around and blanked his eye out.

The screech of metal and the thump of an explosion, both of which he'd expected, didn't come. Instead, he got a delighted squeal from Bjarte as she clapped her hands together sporting a wide, carefree grin. All while his Guardian halfway leaned over the sparrow's steering handles. She'd stopped it an inch away from the nose connecting.

_Hooray,_ he thought. No broken sparrow. No broken bones. _Crisis averted. For now. I'll get back to you later. Love, Ghost._

* * *

**T**hey'd brought one helmet from the camp. One. Nicole had found it stuffed into a pack, where it'd been used as a bowl to hold a herd of unpaired socks together. They'd been kid-sized, naturally. Along with the helmet. Bjarte-sized. So that was the head the helmet went on.

Kneeling in front of her, Nicole carefully clipped the strap closed under Bjarte's chin, gave it a testing wiggle from the top, and then tried on a reassuring smile. Gosh, she hoped it said _I won't crash us, promise,_ even if she didn't much believe it herself. But she had to, right? Believe it. Had to fight to keep the smile in place. Had to fight the scream that'd been building in her chest, wanting out. And fight to get back on her feet, too, because her knee popped and her muscles ached all over from all the walking and running and more walking — and, yeah, that shite night of sleep spent in a scarred landscape of nightmares with nothing but a blanket between her and the hard ground.

At least the fire had been warm.

The dreams? Cold. Full of whispers. With ice tipped claws scratching her insides bloody.

She shivered and tried not to think about it any more. There were other things to worry about now. Like… driving the sparrow from here to _there._ Wherever there was.

"Right. I'm good to go."

Ghost shimmied in from somewhere behind her left elbow and regarded her with a long look. "That didn't sound convincing," he said, his eye pulsing with an almost dulled glow and his shell twisting in a few short, jerky motions.

"Does it matter? What else am I supposed to say? _Can we not?_" Her jaw clenched. "_Not_ hasn't got anyone far. Ever."

He bobbed up and down in a brief sort of nod, and so she decided now or never and climbed back onto the sparrow, placing herself in front of Bjarte. The girl didn't waste a second before digging her hands into Nicole's coat, balling one little fist on her left and the other on the right.

With a deep breath, she leaned forward — and with the same breath held in, coaxed the sparrow into motion. It lurched once. Then twice. Bjarte squished herself against her back, the helmet poking painfully against her spine.

But that was fine. She had this.

Totally. Had. This.

With her bottom lip between her teeth and every ounce of control she could muster, Nicole focused on the odd weightlessness of hanging above the ground. There weren't any wheels grounding her. No crunch of rubber over earth. Nothing but thin air between her and the ground — and sure it wasn't far enough up to be really worth the mention, but it was still _flying._

She was flying.

_Flying._

But where was she flying _to _again?

Nicole looked left. Then right. And then slowed the sparrow to a crawl before turning it to the side, pointing its nose at the edge of the overgrown road and bringing it to a stop. An odd little tug against her ribcage told her exactly where to look to find the dirty white blob that was Ghost coming after them. The red electrical tape she'd used last night helped, too. Made him easier to spot.

Also made it easier to see the dips and sways in his flight line, like someone pretending they could go straight but really should have called an Uber or something.

Her brow furrowed.

He'd been flying around all night, she knew that. Mostly because whenever she'd woken from the Deep? He'd been there. Somewhere. Up in the ceiling. Out by the window. Or closer, just a stone throw away from the fire's light, his clicks and whirrs folded into the pops of the wood burning away.

"Are you going to be able to keep pace with this thing?" she asked once he'd caught up. "I'll be honest, you look a bit knackered."

"_Knackered,"_ he parroted as he floated by her head to point himself down the road. "Yeah, that's me. Thoroughly knackered. But I'll be fine, I'll just—"

With a sigh stuck in her throat, Nicole reached up and tapped a finger against one of his… ends. Tips. Points. Fins. Protruding shell bits. Triangle_bobs_. Anyway, she tapped one of those whatchamacallits enough to spin him around, earning herself a ruffle of nonexistent feathers and a squint. A sleepy squint, if she was to use her imagination.

"_Hey_," he complained.

"Hey," she echoed, her head cocked. Behind her, Bjarte leaned around to look at them, her weight hanging off Nicole's left as she clung to her coat. "There's still plenty of room on here for you. Not like you take up a lot of space. In fact, you take up very little."

He blinked at her, but the retort she expected did not come.

Wow. He had to be really tired.

Eventually (like he'd been thinking it over), he flicked his eye off to the side in a sweeping gesture, light springing from it to come together in a mono-coloured 3D projection. A map. It showed roads and hills and plains and even the tip of a lake nearby. Towns, too. She recognised it all and it made her stomach feel funny — until the map zoomed in quickly, almost turning said stomach. A green blip appeared, connected to an orange line following along mostly flat ground (roads) and eventually hooking up with a red dot at the other end.

"This is where we're headed," he said. The red dot pulsed once. "I can't keep the map open for you while I rest, but if you think you can follow the path for the most part then… then this would work, I suppose. And don't worry about going off course, I'll notice."

"You'll… notice."

"Mhm. And wake up."

"Huh," she mused and looked from the map to him and then down the road, into the direction the map pointed them. It wasn't where the persistent call tugging at her heart wanted her to go, which, yeah, was still there. Getting worse by the hour and awfully hard to ignore. "You're versatile, I'll admit that."

"Talented," he corrected.

"Alright." Nicole jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at Bjarte. "Can't have you rolling off, so maybe she can—" _hang on to you while we go._

A miserable, electronic whine clipped the next word in her throat. Ghost, his shell drooping noticeably, looked between her and Bjarte until finally turning his eye up at her from an angle that read _Pleeeaase._

"I'm driving," she said, flatly. "I can't carry you while I drive, I need both my hands."

He sunk lower. Didn't say a word. Didn't _ask._ Just dipped an inch like a dog ducking its head.

"You're a wee bastard, you know that?"

Sighing, Nicole shook her coat open and glanced at the generous inside pocket she could have easily fit three Switches into if she'd wanted. A pang of misery tickled at her heart. Oh what she'd give to be belly down in her bed playing a game, rather than… here. She winced. Here, with a shirt on that was stiff in places from dried blood. A shirt that had holes in it. And that was how she went from missing handheld gaming to realising she'd slept in her own _blood_ in no more than a second flat. Great.

Nevermind that though.

"And lucky," she added, trying not to want to scratch at her chest which suddenly itched from remembering the blood. "A lucky bastard. This coat is obviously made for men, so it got pockets for days and this one looks about you-sized. Go on. Squeeze in."

**A**nd squeeze in he did, turning into a warm weight settled against her side. Sort of. Not that he was holding still. No. Of course not. At first, all he did was squirm around — a small hard-shelled puppy getting comfortable in a new bed. It made the edges of his shell poke against her ribs. Which, uh, tickled. _Tickled._

Nicole inhaled sharply through her nose and grabbed the sparrow's steering handles like she was going to choke them.

"Are you done yet?" she asked and the squirming paused long enough to make her side itch in anticipation of another round. "Do you need a tiny pillow, maybe? A snack?"

"Sorry," he said, his voice quiet and muffled by the coat. At first she likened it to a phone going off on silent, which would have made sense all things considered. He was, after all, a voice-box with a bunch of fins attached, right? But that didn't quite fit. If anything, it felt more alike to having your ear pressed to someone's back as they spoke. Except in reverse, some odd upside-down version of it.

Nicole bit down on her bottom lip, wished the world normal, and when that did nothing but make the seconds tick by, sent the sparrow down the road.

Accelerating steadily, it carried her further and further away from what'd been home once, with a kid attached to her back, a sun burning in her chest that wanted her to change course, and a _Ghost_ tucked into her coat.

Honest to God, life was weird.

* * *

**L**ife was also perched on a very thin line.

A line between her paying attention and doing anything but. On one end, there was the world zipping by while the sparrow thrummed under her and the wind snatched at her hair — and on the other, there was the intoxicating weightlessness of it all that she couldn't shake. Freedom. A distraction. Call it what you will. But the bottomline was that if she didn't focus, chances were she'd wrap them all around a tree. Sparrow. Her. Bjarte. The sleeping Ghost. And with her mind occupied, she could forget how everything around her had broken a long time ago and come back together different.

Until Bjarte yanked at her coat and cried out. The girl strung together panicked words that Nicole didn't need to know the translation of to catch their meaning. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Nicole hit the brakes, the sparrow decelerating hard enough to almost push her forward onto its neck, and turned around to check on the girl, half expecting her to be falling off or to have caught fire. "What—what— Are you okay?"

Oh. Bjarte was okay. Still hanging on. Still not on fire. Still had her helmet on, too. But that wasn't the problem, was it? The problem was what she was pointing at frantically: a fat metal bulge cobbled together from yesterday's nightmares cresting the tops of the trees lining the horizon like a whale breaching tall waves.

Except whales didn't fly. Or have pincers hanging off their bellies that looked a little like bent feet. And they certainly didn't have a large red eye at the front which filled her stomach with heavy dread.

She _liked_ whales. Who didn't?

She didn't like _this_.

"Ghost…?" Nicole's voice scratched up her throat.

She didn't know what to do. Drive? Yeah, sure but where to? Get off the sparrow and hide in the woods instead?

What was she supposed to _do_?

She glanced down at her coat where Ghost's weight still hung snug against her side. Nothing. Little guy slept like a rock. So she grabbed the coat collar and shook it.

"Ghost!"

And just like that the weight was gone and Ghost appeared by her side, the fragile motes of blue light he materialised out of dancing away into thin nothing.

"Present," he said, wiggling his shell. "Are we already there?"

"Are we… what? No. Ghost, what is that thing?" She pointed at the airship, because what else was she going to call it. It had gotten considerably larger as it'd approached and it'd picked up speed. An alien hum rolled on ahead of it, straddling the line between an aircraft turbine and something she couldn't quite place.

She didn't like that, either.

And, as it turned out, neither did he.

"Son of a _bird…_" Ghost blurted, only to vanish in another wink of blue and return to her pocket like he'd never even left.

…_what…_

"That's trouble," he added from in there. "Fallen. Just _go_. Go!"

He didn't need to ask her twice. Not this time — not like back in the burning village. She kicked the sparrow into gear and didn't even bother asking _Go where?_

Straight ahead would do.

* * *

**Taffer Notes:**

This chapter was brought to you by my new sponsor, Erin, who thinks this is a good premise but that it is badly written. (I really like anon reviews. Don't you?)

Anyway, my apologies for the pace of this, but this is how they want it right now. They wanted another chapter of relative peace before I turn the temperature up again so that is what they get.


	11. The Young Wolf

**Taffer Notes:** *wiggles about excitedly*

* * *

**I**n which Ghost finds out just how stressful being a bound Ghost can be, and Nicole finds her wolf.

* * *

**The Young Wolf**

* * *

**S**he didn't go fast enough.

She tried, the wind stinging at her eyes, her chest almost flat against the sparrow, and her feet pressed hard into the pedals to keep herself from falling off — but it wasn't enough.

"Left ahead!" Ghost called, his voice muffled by her pocket and instantly snatched up by the wind to get carried.

Left. _Left?_

She looked _left _and saw nothing but tall, wild shrubs and trees, blurred by tears stinging at her eyes. And then — a dip in the road. A gap.

Nicole threw her weight to the side, slinging the sparrow off the main road and down another, hurtling for the ruins of a town. Just in time for a bolt of blue energy to come searing over her, missing her head by nowhere near enough. It tore up the air with the stench of ozone so thick she almost choked on it.

The next bolt whipped past her right, where it slammed into the base of a bent over, rusty street sign. In an almost comical display of the world hating her and having a good laugh at her expense, the pole got snapped clean off and the sign sent tumbling over her. She even caught a wink of the city's name spelled out on it as she steered the sparrow through a cloud of sharp debris. Black on what-used-to-be white... and then it was gone. Ripped right into the air and into the slipstream of the airship bearing after them. She knew because she'd chanced a look. One brief glance over her shoulder, passed Bjarte's helmet pressed to her back, and right at the airship keeping up with them.

"Keep going!" Ghost urged. "Into the ruins, get us into the ruins!"

"What do you think I'm _doing!_" she shouted into the wind whistling by her ears. "Why don't _you_ drive!"

"I would if I _could_ but I can't navigate a sparrow without throwing you both off, I—"

Nicole yelped and tore right, narrowly avoiding her knee getting clipped off by an empty, rusted car husk. And then another. And another. The entire road turned into an exercise of trying to keep her damned knee caps on while the city crowded in around them.

This place used to be tiny, she remembered. No more than a village. Then, sometimes between her dying and the world going absolutely mad, it'd grown. And then got smashed to bits. Ruined walls began to rise to the left. More to the right. Didn't take long and she ran out of space to drive the sparrow in. Not unless the thing could actually _fly _— a question she should have probably asked _before _they'd gotten chased.

"What was that? Why— why are you slowing down!?" Ghost popped into view, the weight in her pocket suddenly lifted. "Oh. Okay. Stop and get off the sparrow and— _movemovemove!_"

Nicole choked the sparrow's brakes. It pivoted sharply when she didn't keep her weight straight, the back of it smacking into a car. Sent them spinning.

Good thing, too. A bolt of that air-splitting energy cracked into the ground where they'd been a second ago.

But now her neck hurt fiercely and oh god she _hated this._

Groaning, and with the sparrow still whistle-humming idly, Nicole threw her leg over its front and jumped off. She bolted two steps. Then half of another before she remembered Bjarte. Her heart pinched. Twisted. Like someone'd driven a thorn into it. And from the gash in her heart bled a cold and heavy haze.

The vertigo. Or a promise of it anyway. A promise of it wanting to pull at her.

Pull her apart. Pull her god knew where _to._

_Please, no. Not now._

She swallowed it down best as she could and turned on the spot, snatching Bjarte off the sparrow even as the girl was already halfway off it. Bloody hell, she was heavy. A lot heavier than earlier and definitely heavier than skinny little girls ought to be. But Nicole half carried, half dragged her along anyway.

They chased after Ghost and the sky came down around them.

**H**e led them into an alley. It was tight in here. So tight, Nicole had to push Bjarte on ahead. And it got tighter. And tighter.

Tight enough to bruise her shoulders. Soon she couldn't even _breathe _it got so narrow_._

She stumbled over debris. Over discarded history. And with every other step, Nicole threw a look over her shoulder, half expecting the entire airship to squeeze itself through the gap behind them.

Except that was exceptionally silly, wasn't it?

She would have laughed, though then the alley walls shook and she bit her tongue instead. Flakes of paint and brick dust rained from them. Stung her eyes. And overhead, the airship blocked out the sky, its engines ringing her ears and the sheer bulk of it casting a heavy shadow over them. A shadow too heavy to fathom. So heavy, Nicole couldn't struggle out from under it. She tried, but her legs wouldn't move.

"Guardian!"

Through the ringing in her ears and the thumping of her heart, Nicole heard the notes of a melody coming together. Haunting. Calling. A promise not much unlike the one that'd bled from her heart.

It'd welcome her back to the Deep, it sung. All she had to do was let it.

* * *

**H**is Guardian had been doing so well. At least she had for two hours, forty-six minutes, and twelve seconds, which was not actually adequate time to recharge himself entirely, since she was _not _doing well any more.

Not her fault though. Technically, it'd been the Fallen's fault.

"Guardian!" Ghost flitted back, right over Bjarte's head, and swung into his Guardian's field of vision. She'd stopped with her back pressed to the wall, her knees half folded and her eyes turned up.

Fair enough, because that was where the Fallen skiff hovered, its deployment hooks extended. One by one, Fallen (one-two-three-four-five-six) dropped from them to land on the roofs. Four shanks detached after them.

They hadn't seen them yet.

His Guardian's eyes were set on them though, but they lacked focus. Like whatever she stared at lay way past the skiff. Galaxies away, really.

"_Guardian,_" he repeated, loud as he could possibly get, and flashed a bright burst of light at her eyes. What? It'd worked once.

And it did again. She jolted. With a small, faint noise coming up her throat, she pushed herself off the wall.

"That's right, we need to keep going," he encouraged her. "Right this way. Keep walking. Or, ah, you know. Maybe run. Running is good."

He swung around her head once. Glanced a scan off her — and almost tripped over his sensors blaring nonsense back at him.

_Analyse later. Flee now. Then never tell anyone about the fleeing part. Ever._

"I've been running for _days,_" she snapped, a pulse of _something_ riding in after her words, stoked like a dying fire getting prodded with a stick.

Light. That was what his sensors supplied him with anyway. Kind of. If he squinted and used his imagination to make sense of the wildly oscillating readings. They rubber banded between frequencies as if her Light couldn't make up its mind. Right now, for example, it seemed adamant to be Void Light, but had somehow forgotten how it was supposed to go about coming together right. So it just shivered off her in ripples, invisible to the naked eye save for a pale manifestation of purple tendrils trailing her hands. Bit like faintly coloured smoke puffed from a pipe.

When she pushed and pulled herself forward along the walls, snatches of it lingered on the brickwork, torn off from the rest. And when she clenched her fists, the Light was choked out like a flame starved of oxygen, leaving only the tendrils that'd detached behind. Where the confused Light touched mortar and brick, moss grew.

Literally.

Grew.

Right _now_. This very instant. Soft puffs of green sprouted from the tiniest cracks in the wall to spread like someone had spilled watercolour on paper and it all happened impossibly fast.

Ghost almost froze next to one of those wisps of Light curling in the air. He wanted nothing more but to take a long reading, the need to shove his proverbial nose all the way into it overwhelmingly strong.

Almost, because the universe had a different plan altogether: a Dreg. It'd spotted them and came crawling down the walls like a six legged spider, barking in Eliksni that it'd quite literally eat them.

Ghost did not fancy getting eaten. Neither, he reasoned, did his Guardian. Or their little charge. So he hauled forward like his core had been set on fire, looping a frantic "Run-Run-Run!" all the way, and hoped they'd keep up.

* * *

**T**hey tore out of the alley. He flew straight ahead, across a deeply scarred street upended by a bombardment hundreds of years ago. Miraculously, the assault had left most of the buildings standing, even if some were worse off than others, their facades pulled down and roofs collapsed. And he had to find one that'd offer them shelter while he figured out how to get them all out of this alive.

_All _of them.

He identified the buildings one by one as he sped for them, turning up a total of _four _bars on just this street alone. Well, no. Strictly speaking they were pubs. That's what you called them in Scotland. Scottish pubs. Why'd they need _so many though?_

_Focus._

Halfway across, he paused. Not for long, naturally. He _was _a Ghost after all and what self respecting Ghost couldn't absorb a situation in a split second? That's all he needed to twist around and take stock.

Guardian? Almost right behind him, check. Little girl— attached to said Guardian's front like a monkey as she got carried —check. Fallen coming down the walls. Check. Shanks swooping in and laying down fire?

_Ah-crap-_check.

Thankfully, the streets here were narrow. So narrow, they made it to the other side without loss of life, limb, or parts. A miracle, really, what with superheated slugs tearing into the ground around them where they tore up very, very old wounds. Which was great. Not the superheated slugs — the lack of limb severing. Absolutely and without a shred of doubt great, and where in the Traveler's fat afternoon shadow was he going again?

Into a garage, apparently. The only building his scans hadn't declared unfit for shelter — and even then they'd been generous. He flew under halfway open shutters, bounced up into a dark space large enough to fit at least two Golden Age vehicles, and took another second to reorient.

There was a halfway raised vehicle lift on one side, though it was empty. And so was the rest of the space, like someone'd swept through and picked everything clean, from spare tires to the most basic of tools.

But they'd not taken the distinct smell of oil and lubricant that tickled at his sensors, still clinging on strong even hundreds of years after they'd soaked into the ground.

None of that was important though. His Guardian coming in after him, that was. She struggled considerably, the extra weight of Bjarte hanging off her front almost dragging her to the ground, but she was here. Good. Then two of those superheated shells clapped into the shutters and that was less, ah, good.

Wow. Being a bound Ghost was stressful.

Ghost spun on the spot.

Shelves. Rails. Stairs. _There._ A door, at the far end. Blue paint on wood and that was so irrelevant why'd he even register it...

"Get out the back!" he called, and while his Guardian lugged Bjarte through the room and up the steps, he flitted back to the shutters.

They were old. Solid, but old, their electronics long busted, and so closing them was going to require a little transmat _here_ — he shot up to the left, dismantled the brakes on the chains — and _there_ — and rushed right, vanishing those brakes, too.

The shutters crashed down with a deafening rattle. And a second later came the first heavy (and distinctly fleshy) thump as a Fallen threw itself against them. It tried again and _again_, but the shutters held. All it managed to get through were a couple of frustrated barks.

Ghost puffed out his shell. "Ha."

"_Ghost!_"

Oh. Yeah. Right. Guardian. Mortal danger still not over.

"It's locked," she shouted from across the room. "Did you just bloody _trap_ us in here?"

"I did _not._" _Goodness._ Did he have to do everything around here?

* * *

**T**he door didn't budge. Nicole had kept pushing down the handle like she'd expected the second— third— fourth— try to miraculously be different. But it hadn't been. The locked door remained locked.

So she took a step back and rammed her shoulder against it.

"Stopat," Ghost blurted and got between her and the door. "Never," he added as he dipped lower to hover by the lock. "Use your shoulder."

Nicole settled back on her heels and stared at him. Bjarte's small, clammy hand took that moment to wrap around some of the fingers on her idle hand. She squeezed when the shutters banged and rattled again, louder this time than the first time around.

"What," Nicole managed, her voice scratching up like a needle riding over an old vinyl record. Then her eyes flicked from Ghost to the shutters and back. They had a dent in them now. Any moment now and they'd break.

"Never use your shoulders," he repeated. A cone of light poured from him to light up the handle and the lock. It was almost blinding bright in the dark room. "You'll just hurt yourself. Kick it instead. Right by the doorknob."

The light winked out and he backed away from the door.

"After you."

Dumbly, Nicole raised her knee half an inch before Ghost got in the way.

"I got it. It's _open,_" he said. "And look at the frame, always look at the frame. This one swings the wrong way and—" His shell exploded, the back of it spinning wildly, turning the fin with the tape on into a blurred, red line. "_—nevermindGo!_"

Behind them, the shutters broke.

She yanked the handle, expecting it to just fall right off and leave her stranded here. But it worked. Pulling the door open and grabbing for Bjarte, Nicole fled. Right into a hallway dipped in darkness.

They didn't make it far.

* * *

**H**e noticed the ping delivered to his coms unit right as his Guardian made it to the front of the house. Or what was left of it anyway. Which wasn't much. The entire facade had come down, been reduced to rubble strewn into the streets and exposed the insides of the house to too many years of wind and rain.

And the Fallen had beaten them here.

A message followed the ping: _'Need backup?'_

Ghost spun, counted the Fallen, blasted a resounding _'YES'_ back through the ping's frequency, and felt… defeated.

There were three. Fallen. One dropped from the sheared off edge of the floor above them and landed on the only thing that'd still been standing. A fridge. Now even that toppled, crunching to the floor with a thump, the Fallen riding it grasping its edges with four hands.

Another landed to their right. And the third stood in the street, its shock rifle raised and ready. They didn't waste time gloating.

* * *

**N**icole's first thought was to turn around. Bolt back into the house and, miraculously, find a cupboard under some stairs she could hide in. But the rows of glowing, slanted blue eyes rushing from the dark hallway froze her on the spot. They were everywhere. In front of her. Behind her. Around her. There wasn't anywhere left to run to. Nowhere to hide.

The Fallen opened fire — and out from under her heart welled a cold, dark vertigo. It tore on every fibre of her, made ready to unravel her. Take her away, to where they couldn't hurt her.

**O**ne of the shots was meant for him, and Ghost dodged it with a sideways twist, vanishing in a wink. That was the right thing to do. Every Ghost knew that. _He_ knew that, yesterday's theatrics notwithstanding. You didn't make yourself a target, because at the end of the day, you could bring your Guardian back. But him? No one was going to bring _him_ back. And no one was going to bring the girl back, either.

So he hid and hoped that whoever'd been on the other end of that ping got here fast. There wasn't a damned thing he could do any more.

The other shots were meant for his Guardian. And they didn't miss. Though neither did they — hit?

At first, when he picked up the flare of Void Light pulsing away from her, he expected her to blink. Vanish. She'd done it before, after all. Except all she did was drop to the ground, pulling Bjarte under her with a hard yank, and then the shock bolts— all three shots of them —slammed into a pale dome of Void Light.

His Guardian screamed. The dome flickered. The Fallen fired again. Two more shots exploded against her Light, their white-blue energy dissipating around it like cracks in a pane of glass. The third made it through. Hit her. The dome shattered.

And then one of the Fallen's heads snapped to the side and it fell over dead.

* * *

**A**round her, chaos reigned, but Nicole's world was made of white-hot, searing pain. It webbed across her back, pulling and tearing with every breath she took, and turned her screams into miserable, weak whimpers coming up between choked gasps for air.

And yet she was immeasurably cold.

The pain— and Bjarte pinned under her —were the only points of heat on her. Everything else? Ice. Like all the warmth had leaked from her when the vertigo had flung outwards, rather than pulling her in on herself. And now she was freezing and hurting and she really didn't want to die again.

"Stay down," Ghost told her, his voice sharp and clear despite the chaos all around.

He was down in the rubble with her, where the soft, electronic _tic-tic-tic_ of his shell tickled at her ear, and so she did as told. Not like she could have gotten up anyway, not with how she'd been snap-frozen to the ground like that.

Nicole's fingers curled into the dirt. Then she noticed how she wasn't dead yet.

She swallowed hard and turned her chin up. The Fallen in front of her, and the one to her left, were lying on the ground. _They_ were dead, rather than her. Then three sharp cracks snapped at the air, whistled by overhead, and smacked into the third Fallen in quick succession. It spun on the spot, jerked around by bullets tearing into its side before slumping against a turned over fridge. Dead, too.

She could tell because it fell with its face turned her way and close enough for her to see the eyes wink out. Like someone'd flicked a switch. Which was kind of what dying was, wasn't it?

Here now. Gone then.

On. Off.

And then back on again, in her case.

Her mind limped on, told her how the Fallen's entire head was encased in a spiky, insectoid helmet. Thick tubes protruded from its chin like it was wearing a rebreather. But they weren't underwater, she tried to reason. Why was nothing making _sense_?

A beat later, large, bulbous drones began falling from the sky. _THUNK-THUNK-THUNK_ they went around her. One of them landed only a few feet from her. Screeching horribly, it spun wildly on the ground before going up in a dull explosion. Fortunately, most of the shrapnel missed her. Unfortunately, _some_ didn't and came down on her like nails being hammered into her back.

"Watch where you drop those shanks!" Ghost complained, while all _she_ managed was to grind her teeth. There weren't any screams left in her to spend.

After that? One more of those _shanks_ fell from the sky and then there was silence. For the most part, anyway. The lull, underlined by Ghost's ticking shell, was eery. As if a storm had rolled over her and she lay right in the centre of it, waiting for the rest to hit.

But rather than a storm, she got Ghost appearing from his shower of light. He hung so low, the tip of one of his fins scraped at the ground while he swivelled on the spot.

When his eye fixed into a direction, Nicole looked that way, too, right as a man vaulted over the hips-sized remains of the house's front wall. An _armoured_ man, whose boots crunched down heavily when he landed. He had a rifle slung from a strap at his front — and wore a large, tarnished bronze helmet, the sides of it adorned with a pair of large horns curving downwards.

Horns.

Nicole stared.

He took one step. Paused. And lifted his left arm, a finger on his gauntleted hand extended. _Hold on,_ the gesture read.

His hand curled into a fist, and with an auditable creak of leather squeezed purple light out of nothing. Nicole's insides churned like she'd swallowed a bucket of grit and he'd just twisted his hand inside her gut rather than up in the air.

The light reminded her of what'd fallen off her when she'd run for her life. Except its purple was darker. Vivid. Almost alive, coiling up and around his arm like living rope. And then, with a flick of his arm and his fingers splayed, it whipped from his arm like a chain. It arched through the air, sailed right over her head — and when he yanked his arm up, the chain snapped back.

It came back dragging a Fallen like a fish on a hook. The thing flew over her, arms and legs flailing helplessly, and met a hollow explosion of purple light at the end of the chain. It dropped like a sack of rocks and stayed there.

"That," a voice called dryly, "was _entirely_ unnecessary, Shephard." A Ghost, as it turned out. He popped out of a shower of light not unlike the one she'd almost grown used to, and hovered by the man's shoulder.

And, she noted dumbly, he looked absolutely nothing like hers. Where hers was all angles and points and fins and whatnots, this one was perfectly round.

"Shush, Darrow," the man —Shephard— said while shaking out his right hand and flexing his fingers.

Who'd have thought? Turned out punching something his own size to death smarted.

His Ghost, in the meantime, did some flexing of his own, his shell puffing out in frustration.

Then they both looked at her.

"How you doing down there?" Shephard asked, his voice coming out hollow from under the helmet, tinged with concern. When he started walking into her direction he moved slowly. Carefully.

But there was nothing slow or careful about Ghost buzzing around her all of a sudden. "Are you okay, Guardian?" He echoed and swung in front of her face. She blinked. Huffed at him. And winced when all that did was reignite the fire obviously melting her spine away. Ghost darted out of sight, vanished up around her shoulder and blurted a very unhelpful: "Oh no. This looks like it hurts."

Nicole gritted her teeth. "No shit."

Ghost's "Don't worry, I can fix that." barely registered before a warmth pushed down on her and promptly washed away not only the white-hot pain, but thawed the ice in her bones, too.

Just like that.

It left her feeling lightheaded. Almost weightless. So maybe— _maybe_ —she could get up now. If her shaking noodle arms permitted, anyway.

"Guardian, huh?" Shephard said, sounding surprised.

When she finally looked up and pushed herself back onto her knees, he'd taken his helmet off. The large, horned monstrosity hung off his hand for a second before his Ghost (Darrow?) flicked a beam of light over it and unceremoniously reverse printed it out of existence.

"And hey, there's _two_ of you," Shephard added with a lopsided grin while he swept his gauntleted hand through a spiky mop of black hair. Not much good that did him though. By the time he reached her and offered her a hand, the hair he'd tried to flatten had sprung back up.

Nicole stared dumbly, her vocabulary reduced to jumbled letters. She barely managed an awkward "Uh—" before he grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet.

"What she means is _Thank you,_" Ghost said.

"I bet she does." Shephard's grin ticked up a notch.

It was friendly, the grin. Genuine. Lit up his sharp green eyes and all that. Very green eyes.

And while he went on to help up Bjarte and inquired about who _this_ young lady was and if she'd like a chariot to the Big City, Nicole found herself rooted to the spot, all colour draining from her face.

Because of all the possible things in the world this man could come bearing on his dirty gold chest plate? She intoned a quiet, numb whimper stuck halfway up her chest.

It had to be _wolves._

Two of them. They had their heads turned to each other, their teeth bared and ears slanted back. Wear and tear and polish had worn down the coat of gold from their bevelled contours to bare winks of steel. Like giving the wolves a dusting of white hair.

Nicole couldn't help it.

She thought they looked awfully familiar.


	12. Kinderguardian Pickup

**Taffer Notes:** I am so excited and happy to bring you the first chapter co-written with Maverick-Werewolf. She'll be writing John's POV sections since both him and Darrow are two original characters plucked right out of a Sci-Fi story collection she's writing. And because we love writing stories together. So! New POV! This chapter will be shared between Nicole and John.

* * *

**I**n which Nicole keeps fretting over a set of green eyes, Ghost outs himself as needing a little coaching on matters of privacy, and John gets his first shot at picking up a Kinderguardian.

* * *

**Kinderguardian Pickup**

* * *

**L**ife composes a tune for us, names it fate, and counts on us to dance to every note. You'd think it expects us all to be born dancers. Some aren't.

Destiny is a row of tracks in the sand. They match the shape of our feet perfectly, but sometimes we can't help but stumble from their path. Roam.

And yet, when it matters, we're always exactly where we're meant to be.

* * *

"**J**ohn Shephard," the man with wolves howling at each other on his breastplate introduced himself.

"Nicole Brennan," she replied in an instant, more on instinct than anything. But it took her a moment to notice how he'd extended his hand and how it hovered there, leisurely. Patiently waiting for her to shake it. A moment which she spent choking down the flutter of dusty, dry moth wings.

She didn't. _Couldn't._

All she could do was stand there, her eyes locked on him and a noose snaring her chest together tight. It wasn't even that he looked threatening, the rifle on the strap and armour notwithstanding. The opposite, really. He held his head slightly cocked, curiously so, and yet all she wanted to do was turn around and be elsewhere again. Not in front of him, surrounded by dead things.

A recurring thing, that.

Swallowing hard enough to make her throat click, Nicole fidgeted on the spot and let her arms dangle. This was really frelling embarrassing but what the hell was she supposed to do?

John Shephard and his Ghost passed a look between each other that lasted only a tic but seemed to say a lot.

"He's with the Vanguard," _her_ Ghost interjected, breaking the silence as he shot past her to float around John's head, dodging around the other Ghost with a downwards twirl. "With the City."

John shot him a smirk. It bunched his lips up into the unkempt scruff clinging to his chin and added a glint to his already unsettling bright green eyes. The hand that'd been waiting for her to grab it (finally) moved up to wave Ghost off.

"What happened to _you_, buddy? Flew into another eagle?" His eyes tracked Ghost.

Ghost puffed out his shell. "Fallen," he said and dodged a lazy gesture from John, who followed his every move with a gloved finger.

"Ouch. The red is a cute touch though."

With a huff, his shell snapping back together, Ghost returned to float by her shoulder.

"Alright," John said. "Let's be gone before the afterparty starts. Darrow, get the ship. And you, young lady—" He turned to Bjarte, who'd kept to being her exceptionally silent self, grabbed her under the shoulders, and hoisted her up to perch her on his shoulders. She went up with a quiet squeal of delight and immediately clutched on to tufts of his hair. Second later she began babbling in Scandi. Not like that deterred John. He joined right in, his American accent turning the words around a little like someone singing a song just a little off-tune.

When he started walking, skirting corpses and debris and walls to head out of the ruins and out into the streets, Nicole found her legs heavy and unwilling to move.

"So… he's… a Guardian? And you know him?" she asked, keeping her voice low while she watched Bjarte up on John's shoulders and Darrow buzzing on ahead.

"Shephard?" Ghost inched forward. "Yeah. Hard not to."

She took her first step, though it felt a bit like lifting her feet out of a tightly packed swamp. The ones after that came a little easier.

"He's killed a Hive God, see. Actually, come to think of it, there were two, except one was more of a God-Prince and Traveler knows what the other one was by the time he got to him. Oh! And then there was that time he took down the Kell of Kells with nothing but two rounds in the chamber and—"

She threw him a sideways glance, her teeth scraping over the inside of her cheeks. He'd go on forever, she knew that by now. Keep saying words that made no sense to her. So she butted in.

"Ghost?"

He hushed in a hurry and swung his eye at her.

"Remember that— ah— that vision? That thing that happened to me when I…" More moths beat their dry wings in her throat and cracked her voice. "Oh bloody hell this sounds bonkers saying it out loud."

"When you died," he said for her. "Yes, I remember. You saw the Traveler. And lots of lights. And—"

"A wolf," she blurted and awkwardly clambered over some rubble in their way. "I saw a wolf." Nicole's stare snapped back onto John's back. He was leading them along the road and throwing the occasional look over his shoulder, checking on them.

Ghost, in the meantime, narrowed the blue light on his eye as he looked at her. "What? No. You're not saying that he— no."

"The wolf had a black coat," she added. "He has, ah, black hair."

Ghost had slowed down enough to have returned to her side — close enough for the tic tic tic of his shell twitching to make the side of her head itch. She reached up. Scratched at her ear. Then her neck. And her shoulder, too. Gosh, she needed a shower.

"And its eyes were green."

"That— that's _ridiculous,_" he spluttered.

Right when the air got picked up by a gust of wind. Dust swirled wildly from a roof to their right, chased off by a large airship.

Nicole's knees locked up and she almost fell right to the ground.

"It's okay!" Ghost said quickly. "That's a City Hawk. That's Shephard's ship."

"Oh." And imagine that, this one didn't go and shoot at them and neither did it spit out any Fallen. It looked considerably different, too. Not bulbous and rusty and… alien. It was sleeker, the main body coming together in a sharp nose, and painted almost entirely in a dull black. Scrapes lined it from top to bottom, the brighter metal underneath shining through. At the end of its wings hung a pair of turbines which rotated as she watched.

They caught the _Hawk_ midair, slowing its descent, and when a few heartbeats passed and it still wasn't shooting them down — and John kept marching towards it as it angled itself over the flat remains of a city square to begin sitting down — she figured Ghost was right.

"And ah, Guardian?"

She glanced at him.

"Might be best to, uh— uh— not tell him? Not right away. About the wolf, I mean."

Exhaling slowly, Nicole nodded. Maybe he was right about that, too.

* * *

**J**ohn led the way back toward the lowered boarding ramp of his ship — or, well, he tried to lead the way. Darrow, of course, floated on ahead.

"Darrow," John chided lightly. Darrow wheeled to face him, but he didn't say a word. Surprisingly.

"Here we go," he said, setting Bjarte down at the base of the ramp and she seemed happy enough to scamper on inside, Darrow floating in after her. John, though, turned and watched Nicole and… Ghost. Imagine that, maybe he'd finally get a name now?

Or maybe not yet, from the way Nicole — looked. Moved. Talked. John frowned for half a second thinking about it.

She really didn't look comfortable with anything at all. Granted, she didn't have much reason to, especially considering what she was wearing. Still, he couldn't help but have a thought he wanted to kick himself over a moment later. _Rude, John._

But that thought was: she didn't look like a Guardian. It kind of came with the territory to be built from grit or something like it. To, at the very least, have some of that under the surface. Have some muscle, be athletic, or maybe lithe and mean.

Her, though, she didn't really look the part. She wasn't short, not really, but she wasn't exceptionally tall, either. Straight nose, maybe just a tiny bit on the bigger side, and imperfections on her skin that were a far cry from battle scars. Acne wars, maybe; definitely a veteran.

Still, in a word, she was… soft, with long brown hair completely mussed up to the point of making her look like she'd been living in the bushes for a few days. Very scary bushes that were trying to eat her, that she had to run from and constantly stay on edge.

The brown eyes were soft, too. Her looking everywhere with them like she expected a shadow to jump out and kill her any second only added to that, even if, right now, she seemed to have acquired some kind of grim resignment to everything and moved toward the front of his ship like someone who'd decided there was nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other.

But she was coming, so John turned and ascended into the ship, himself. Once he did, though, he caught himself waiting again, looking over his shoulder.

That one foot in front of the other he'd mentioned stopped pretty abruptly when she reached the base of the ramp. She just stood there, unmoving. Then Ghost floated over and right past her. Only then did she come up after him.

John gestured her inside with a friendly smile, lifting the ramp in her wake. She still didn't speak, glancing around but not seeming to really take her surroundings in so much. Not yet, anyway.

They were nice, though. Her surroundings. This was his home, for all intents and purposes, so he tried to keep it cozy. The front was mostly business: weapons locker, armor stash. Weights. Those kinds of things. He'd even kept half the passenger seats against one of the walls, leftovers from the Hawk's troops transport days before he'd refurbished it. But towards the back, especially behind the curtain cording off the rest of the ship, was where the fun started.

Anyway.

Letting the smile slowly melt away, he cocked his head ever so slightly and prompted, "How long you been out there?"

"A while," she said vaguely. From the way her eyes suddenly looked a little distant, he wondered if she even knew.

"Two days," Ghost added. "Her and I, anyway. Bjarte there, she's a local. _Was _a local, we found her after we ran into a— a— Fallen trap. Yeah. A trap. Oh! I should probably give you the coordinates to the village and—"

John mulled around the ship while Ghost yammered on, and had another thought. With Darrow still hovering ominously around his head, he turned to Nicole.

"You should get out of… all that," he said, putting on another smile. I can't imagine it's very comfortable." He nodded to the curtain at the back. "You can change back there. Promise I won't peek."

_C'mon, smile once. Just a little._

She didn't smile. She only nodded and then looked around like she was looking for said clothes. What she found was the weapons locker. She stared at it and tensed up all over again.

"I'm sure they won't fit," he warned. Then he looked at Darrow, who was busily holding a silent staring contest with Ghost, and said, "Find her some better clothes, Darrow. I need to get us in the air."

"Oh, of course, your highness. Should I fetch you a drink while I'm at it?"

Not missing a beat, John replied genuinely, "No, thanks. I don't want to push the drinking and flying envelope when I have passengers. But it's very sweet of you to offer."

Darrow grated out a mechanical sort of huff and floated off. Meanwhile, John turned his attention to Bjarte, who had occupied herself peering out the front of the ship and trying not to lean too far over all the controls. The moment he approached, she turned a little timid and stood flat on her feet again, like a little soldier waiting for orders.

John just flashed her a lopsided smile and directed her over into one of the passenger seats, helping her buckle in before fetching a powerbar and a bottle of water, crouching in front of her with one in each hand.

"These don't taste too great," he said to her in Scandi, "but you should eat it. If you eat the whole thing, I've got some _awesome _suckers – I kinda hoard them like a dragon. I'll give you one before we get back to the Tower. Sound good?"

He gave her a gentle nudge on the shoulder before he rose to his feet again and turned to the pilot's chair – just in time for Ghost to come zipping right up to him.

"Thank you," he said. Hey, someone said it. Not that he needed to hear it, but he did appreciate it. John gave him a slight smile and a nod.

"You're welcome," he replied, taking a seat and getting the ship fired up.

Ghost lingered in the corner of his vision. "What were you doing out here?"

"Tracking our mutual Fallen friends." John shot him a look. Then, after a pause, made a wry face and said, "I thought it was boring. I thought it'd _be _boring. But hey, now I got to save your butt and even do my first Kinderguardian pickup."

The laugh that Ghost half-tittered, half whined out – as much as a Ghost could do those things – sounded so nervous it almost gave John second-hand embarrassment. He blinked.

"Relax; you'll blow a fuse. She'll be fine…"

"Or maybe she won't," Darrow said as he floated up on the opposite side of John's head. John took a lazy swipe at him, and Darrow deftly dodged aside.

"Best behavior when we have guests, Darrow," John chided.

"This _is _my best behavior," Darrow replied, his voice flat.

"Anyway," John looked at Ghost again, "she'll get used to it. She just needs time. Not everybody slides right into the whole _Guardian_," he said dramatically, "thing instantly. It can be a pretty crappy existence sometimes, especially when you get told about it before you get to _live _it. And then you get Fallen chewing your ankles, first thing. I'm sure she'll do great."

Ghost's shell flared out briefly, then came back together so nervously each piece almost grated on each other. Kind of reminded John of somebody setting their jaw, so that prompted him to do exactly that. Probably in anticipation of whatever Ghost wasn't saying.

Finally, after a few long moments—

"Spit it out," Darrow snapped. John frowned at him.

"She remembers," Ghost blurted in a tiny whisper, like he was afraid someone would hear.

John froze. Stared. Right by his head, he heard Darrow's shell practically fly to pieces in sheer outrage. About the same instant, John rediscovered his ability to speak.

The same time Darrow did, in fact.

At once, they blurted: "She _what!?_"

Darrow flew right in front of John's face trying to get in _Ghost's _theoretical face and started ranting as fast as his electronic little voice could possibly go.

"Are you completely out of your mind? I knew you were entirely clueless but this reaches new and untold levels of _jaw-dropping incompetence!_ Do you understand what—"

"I didn't do it on _purpose_—"

"Oh, well, _even better!_" Darrow shrieked.

"_Kids_," John snapped. Both of them turned their little glowing eyes to him, Ghost's wide and Darrow's furious. John took a deep breath and said, "Don't make me pull this ship over."

That earned him a glare from Darrow and unmollified silence from Ghost, who slowly lowered himself out of sight.

* * *

**N**icole pulled the curtain shut — and for the longest time stood there, a hand bunched into the thick fabric, the clothes she'd been given shoved under her arm, and her eyes fixed on her shoes. Her soggy, dirty shoes. The feet in them hurt.

Around her, the ship grumbled noisily.

"Hang on back there!" John called, his voice bouncing through the ship loud enough he might as well have been standing right in front of her.

She tightened her grip on the curtain when the grumbling of the ship turned to a meaty roar. The floor jerked. Tilted, just a bit, and then they were up in the air. Her stomach though? That took a while to catch up.

Honestly? She felt like she was going to be sick. Not from the flying, she'd never minded that. Ever. Even if this felt _different,_ considering they were going up straight. Bit like a helicopter, except not and she'd not ever been in a helicopter anyway so what did she know?

Bile rose in her mouth. Back here behind that curtain, doused in the dull glow of a row of soft lights overhead, it was just her, her dirty clothes, that tugging on her heart, and vultures for thoughts. Nicole swallowed and tried to think about something — anything — else. Like the walls. They were plastered with posters. Colourful ones. Plain ones. Pretty _retro_ ones, too. Where some looked like they'd been ripped right out of comic books, others could have been album covers.

She didn't recognise any of them.

Of course she didn't.

Nicole stepped away from the curtain, popped her shoes off, peeled her socks off her feet, and dropped the heavy, dirty coat on top of all of it, keeping it all far away as possible from the well trodden carpet covering half the floor.

The carpet led up to a mattress at the back. No bed frame or anything, no. Just a mattress, with plain grey sheets neatly folded on one end and two wrinkle free pillows on the other. A metal box pretended at being a nightstand table on the other, which shared that space with a stack of hardcover books. The books were pinched between heavy looking bookends. Probably so they didn't go sliding about when the ship turned, she figured. And propped up against the metal box sat a guitar. An old acoustic one. Made of dark burnished wood. Its neck was fixed to the wall with a leather loop.

She stared at it while shedding her trousers and kicking them onto the pile, too. A pile which looked mighty fine for burning by now, she thought.

The trousers she'd been given didn't fit. Naturally. They were too long and too wide, but that was what belts were for. She'd gotten socks, too. They felt a bit like heaven.

But heaven wasn't a thing that lasted.

Nicole squirmed out of her shirt next, her arms, shoulders, and every string of muscle in her back protesting all the way through. When she pulled it over her head she saw through the holes in it. Big. Gaping. Holes. She chucked it onto the pile, her stomach lurching into the opposite direction the ship leaned into around her, and bit down her cheek.

Tears welled in her eyes.

Blinking didn't help. Neither did looking down her front. All she found there was skin. Unbroken. No holes. She dug her fingers into it. Tried to find where she'd gotten shot, but there was nothing.

She slumped against the wall and cried.

* * *

**T**hings in the cockpit had settled down, with Darrow having abandoned floating by John's head to go have a huff to himself somewhere in the back of the ship. Not that John minded. He focused on flying.

Flying was, after all, his favorite escape. One of the only things he found truly relaxing, other than playing music. Plus he had his own personal auto-pilot system built into his head, so he could happily space out without risk of—

"She's been back there a while," Ghost suddenly said. John stirred from his trance and looked just to his left, where Ghost had resumed floating by his side. But that one blue eye of his wasn't on John or on where they were flying – he stared into the back of the ship, right at the curtain that currently concealed Nicole from view.

"I should go check on her."

John licked his lips and hummed a reluctant, thoughtful sort of sound. "Iii… wouldn't, really. Maybe she needs some space."

"Just to make sure she's okay," Ghost clarified. John opened his mouth to say something else, but Ghost instantly took off floating toward the curtain with remarkable speed.

"Whoa, hey, Ghost, maybe don't just…"

Nicole screamed. John bit his lip.

_Maybe don't just bust in there, _John finished mentally. Little late.

Ghost came shooting back out like a bullet, repeating, "I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry!"

A shoe came sailing out from behind the curtain after him, but it missed its mark. Something absurd in John wanted to laugh, but he didn't.

"I just wanted to see if you're alright, Guardian," Ghost half stammered, wheeling around to face the curtain again. Right in time for Nicole to come out, while sticking her arms through the sleeves of an entirely too-large shirt.

"Stop calling me that," she said. "_Don't _call me that. I'm not—" she huffed and tried readjusting the floppy shirt, "a Guardian."

"You put yourself between the Fallen and Bjarte," Ghost said brightly, all puns intended. Bjarte, hearing her name, looked up like a cat just called to supper. "That's a very Guardian thing to do."

Nicole didn't exactly look inspired. "That's a decent human being thing to do," she countered flatly.

Briefly, no one said anything. John, after a short bout of chewing his lip, decided to break the silence. It was way too uncomfortable in here.

"She has a point," he put in. That got Nicole's attention. When she turned to regard him, John managed a small smile and motioned her toward the seat beside him with a jab of his chin.

* * *

**T**he fresh clothes were nice. Considerably too wide and too long all across the board, but nice. So Nicole tried to focus on that. On the weight of the shirt on her shoulders, falling around her like a tent and carrying a crisp, heady scent. Much better than blood and sweat.

Her lips twitched. It didn't take two steps and her mind was back to wandering, starting with the weapons in that locker. The guns— small ones, big ones. Snub-nosed ones. Long barrelled ones. And the knives. Very large knives. Everything looked exceptionally clean.

By the time she made it to the front of the ship and sat like John had indicated her to, she'd forgotten about the weapons. They weren't important anymore, not with all the dirty clouds getting sliced apart by the nose of the ship and a brilliant blue sky opening up around her. Out there, somewhere— she turned her head slightly left, eyes set on nothing —_something_ tugged again. Harder this time. More insistently. The angler reeling in their catch. Unfortunately, she was the one at the end of that line, and the hook had sunk into her heart where it kept tearing and tearing and tearing.

"Seatbelt," John said. The line snapped.

Nicole stared down dumbly, her hands groping at thin air cause they didn't know where to start looking. At least until Ghost nudged the harness with his shell.

"Ta." She dragged it over her chest, snapped it in place, and then looked up to find a bunch of eyes on her. Ghost. Darrow. John.

They were all staring in some way or the other. Ghost had his eye set on her with his shell a little deflated and his blue light almost dull. Darrow was… squinting. His round shell— made of sections painted mostly in rich purple —pulled down like so many eyebrows.

And John? He carried a faint, unnervingly hard to read smile. Not like she'd ever been good at that anyway. Reading people. Miss Gullible, reporting for duty, Sir. Plus, all she saw were the sharp green eyes of the wolf, fixed on her out from the smothering dark. It made her world spin.

So she set her jaw and John turned to flying again. His glances cut from the view out there to the screens set into the console around him. Screens that were hopefully telling him that they weren't about to get shot out of the sky. And for a while that was how the minutes ticked by; in stifling silence.

Least until his attention shifted back to her. Because why not?

"When did you die?"

Caught off guard by the question, Nicole stared at him, her throat working quietly and her thoughts reeling off to the side, out the back of the ship, and off into the nether.

Did he know? About how something had gone wrong? From the way he watched her, curious, she figured he did.

But— aright. This was something she could answer, even if she glanced at Ghost first. The back half of his shell ticked left once and he bobbed up and down in a faint nod. _Go ahead, _the gesture read.

"April 2019." Being _able _to say it and it going _well _were two different things, apparently. Because saying it felt like choking up a bucket of sludge. Or water. Cold, bloody water tasting of bent metal and a decision made through tears.

One of John's eyebrows hiked up into his forehead — and both Ghosts snapped their eyes at each other. Right before they exclaimed, in unison: "That's when the Traveler arrived in the system!"

If John hadn't raised his hand, they'd have probably kept going.

"You're pre-Golden Age then," he said, his eyebrow still cozy with his hairline. "Before the Traveler. Before we went to Mars and started uploading people into robots."

She stared blankly. Was he yanking her chain?

"Me?" John continued. "I don't know when I died. The first time, anyway. _He_ does, but he won't tell me." His eyes cut to Darrow. The Ghost rolled his body like someone might roll their eyes.

John's gaze fixed back on her. "We're not supposed to know," he said. Gravely. Though without judgment or concern. Not like when Ghost had found out, anyway.

"So I heard."

"There's a good reason for that. If you don't know who you've been, you don't come loaded with all the baggage from that life. There's nothing to distract you. No chasing after yesterdays—" He gestured vaguely. "Or trying to find family or thinking you have to pick up where you left off. We're meant to be raised as clean slates so that all we have is tomorrow. Supposedly that makes it easier. Especially if you don't have a point of reference to compare today with. Gets rid of all those questions, ya know?"

His brow was furrowed slightly and his jaw jumped. Like he didn't much buy what he was selling.

"Plus, we don't have to unlearn dying. We—" He paused, looked at her for a moment, and then tapped at his chest. "It makes us Guardians treat death a whole lot different than the Lightless do. I mean, you're more likely to risk your neck for someone, or _something_, if you know that breaking it isn't really a big deal, right?"

Nicole looked down, at her fingers curled into the trousers, bunching the fabric together just above her knee.

"So when you went and stuck your neck out for Bjarte like that? Sure, you're right saying it was a decent thing to do, but it was a whole lot braver coming from you than it'd have been from any other Guardian. Take me, for example. Far as I'm concerned this is all I've ever done and will be doing until Darrow decides he's done rezzing me."

The pause that followed made her look back up — at John still staring at her. He'd put on a smile that seemed oddly weighted. Like something darker hung off it.

"You on the other hand? You don't just have an entire life _behind _you— something I can't say I do —but also one in _front _of you. Now… what you do with that second chance is up to you."

His smile kicked up. Brightened. "And if anyone says different you tell them to come talk to me."

Nicole leaned back into the seat, her thoughts a jumbled mess. They kept falling over. How was any of this _real?_

"Nicole, right?"

She glanced at him. Nodded.

"You'll be okay."


	13. Hollow Harbour

**I**n which Ghost gets to sign theoretical paperwork and Nicole never actually touches her garlic.

* * *

**Hollow Harbour**

* * *

**R**agged, dirty clouds were most of what Nicole saw as she sat with her hands folded in her lap, her fingers pressed together tight. She'd have liked to pretend that she found some peace in the quiet up here. In that no-mans-land between the land rushing by underneath and the sky occasionally peeking in through the dense cloud cover.

But, no. Instead, the song in her bones sung on and her mind walked itself silly in her head. Didn't take much and her left knee started bouncing.

The clouds rolled on.

"Sooo... got anything new for me?" John asked Ghost eventually, breaking a silence that'd gone on so long it was probably old enough to vote by now. He also threw Ghost a look, one that hung on to her briefly and got the hairs at the back of her neck to stand at rapt attention.

But anyway. Voting.

Was that still a thing?

She frowned. What about book clubs? Yoga classes? To be fair, she'd never gone to a single book club _or _yoga class her entire life. Helen had. Always swore they were amazing. The yoga, anyway. Suddenly, Nicole wanted nothing more than to do that, too.

While she rummaged about in her head about things she'd have liked to do and hadn't, Ghost tumbled his way by her (no, really — he did two lazy flips in the air). She watched, quietly, as a flimsy burst of light licked from his eye. It connected with a section of the ship's cockpit console and all of a sudden there was music.

Very _loud_ music. Guitar riffs. Drums. Bass. The whole shebang. It was one part familiar and one part alien — like something new coming together with something old — as it poured out of speakers set somewhere around her and Nicole thought for a moment her heart was going to give up. Just. Stop. Right there.

"Easy there, buddy." John flicked a hand over some controls to settle the volume. He cocked his head to the side a little, and while his eyebrow shot up, his lips pulled down in an appraising sort of frown. "Not bad though."

"And do you ever think about looking for anything else?" Darrow threw in, the sections of his round shell unevenly pushed out. "Golden Age technology? Research Data? Anything _useful_?"

"Useful? You mean like a Guardian?" Ghost shot back. "Oh, _wait_, she's sitting right _**here**_—"

Darrow made an exasperated sigh. It was convincing for coming from such a small ball.

And then the music shifted. On the inside. Not the outside. That tune that'd played for her ever since she'd fallen into the Dark and then fallen back out of it.

It called her forward, and Nicole leaned into its direction, her seatbelt digging into her shoulders. But she had to get closer to the cockpit window. Had to see. Except there wasn't anything there when she looked to the left. Just more clouds. Thick and dark. Except then the ship angled down sharply, sliced through them, and when they pulled out underneath a spell of vertigo almost popped her head right off her shoulders. That was uncomfortable and she _hated _it.

The clouds opened to mountains and wide planes of ice.

"I swear," Darrow said, "the Traveler must have dropped you when you were made. This isn't a—"

"_Darrow._"

She heard John snap his name. Heard, faintly, how an argument flared, but all she could do was stare out the window. Which was infuriating, because she didn't know _why._ Not really.

Nicole had never been very good at imagining the impossible.

* * *

**G**host had been looking forward to this. A whole lot. Ghosts always said it was a special moment; that second when their Guardian first saw the Last City. The Traveler.

When they'd come home.

But rather than shimmying about excitedly and blurting _See, I promised I'd get you here,_ all he could think of was that, if Darrow had a neck and he had hands, he would have very much liked to _squeeze_ said neck. But alas; no hands. No neck. No happy shimmying. Plenty of guilt though, since Darrow was right.

"Give me a break. I _know_ I messed up," he said, his eye cutting from Darrow to Shephard and back. The latter wasn't looking at him though, kept eyeing his Guardian instead. Ghost honestly didn't know how to feel about that. "It's not like I ever said I didn't."

What? It was true. He'd admitted to it from the start. _And it stings being told out loud, okay?_ More than he cared to admit.

Darrow got right up into his lens again, his eye pulsing all squinty like, but when Shephard flicked the ship's coms on, the rant he'd probably been about to launch into spluttered out.

"Tower, this is City Hawk six-three-seven," Shephard said. Loudly. Darrow huffed, his shell clicking noisily, and rolled himself off to the side. "We're making our approach and are looking for a dock."

It didn't take a second before the coms clicked and he had a reply.

"City Hawk six-three-seven, Tower is receiving," one of the operators came back cheerfully. "Good hearing from you again."

"Miah, hey. Good being back." Shephard's focus shifted to the controls. The ship subtly adjusted its bearings, heading steadily down into its approach trajectory. "Now, about that dock." His lips kicked up into a coy grin. "You have a free spot to park myself in?"

"Oh _please,_" Darrow muttered from the sideline.

The operator snorted and her voice jittered slightly. Yeah. Most humans were _horrible_ at being subtle. And this was all about as forward as it got. Even Ghosts could tell. "For you, always. Codes transmitted. You're cleared for approach, City Hawk six-three-seven." A pause. "And my shift ends at six."

"Mhmmm," he hummed. "Codes received."

And then he glanced up at Ghost and gave a nod towards his Guardian. A pointed and very effective _go, look_ motion that made Ghost spin on the spot.

* * *

**T**here, dipped in clouds and surrounded by ranges of snowcapped mountains as far as her eye could see, was the Impossible.

A massive sphere that, for a moment, made her think someone had plucked the moon from the night sky. Then they'd polished it, painted it a silvery-white, and pinned it above a city. A large city, with tall bleached walls, its buildings sprawling out underneath the sphere like a lake.

The _impossible_ sphere. Because it floated. Nothing that big floated, hence impossible.

And familiar.

Nicole chewed on the inside of her cheek. It was a movie playing out, frame by frame, every second of it a deja-vu wanting to convince her she'd seen it before. Except she hadn't. Couldn't have.

Or a stranger who insisted they were more. And, maybe, if she closed her eyes and focused, she'd remembered the scent of their hair, but not their name. The sound of their laugh, but not their voice.

It drove her mad.

It took a flick of red on white dancing into her vision to jostle her back into order. Ghost. He rolled once — a tight, merry motion — and said, proudly: "The Traveler."

Nicole clenched her jaw and leaned back into the seat, her heart going fast enough to beat a tattoo out against her ribcage if it'd been so inclined. It'd probably be a real messy one though.

"It looks a lot more impressive in person, doesn't it?"

She nodded faintly.

"And the Last City," he continued, still chipper. "Isn't it amazing? It started with a bunch of shacks right under the Traveler when it first arrived here on Earth to protect you."

Off to the side, John puffed out a barely audible scoff.

Ghost doubled down. "When it made _us_. The Ghosts. The Guardians. And ever since then the City has been growing bigger. From village to town to metropolis, all watched over by the Vanguard. And the Traveler, of course.

"It's not only last of its kind though. The City, I mean. It's also the first. Humanity's hope for a future where you've taken back the solar system and the walls can finally come down."

"Rousing," John said.

Ghost twisted his shell around to look at him. "Thank you."

Though when Nicole glanced at John, she couldn't tell how he'd meant that. Mocking. Genuine. A little bit of both. The quiet, minuscule smile he had on didn't tell her a thing — except then it kicked up when he caught her looking and he fixed his eyes on her. Probably to reassure her, really.

Because that was what people did, wasn't it. They smiled at you when they were trying to get you to calm the fogging hell down. It was the polite thing to do.

And it didn't work. No. All it ended up achieving was that she wanted to _not_ be on the ship any more. Rather, she'd have preferred solid ground under her feet if it wasn't too much of a bother. And for that ever-present pressure in her chest to stop. The pressure that'd gone from pulling to squeezing as they'd drawn closer to the City. To the Traveler.

To the impossible.

The ship's engines rumbled, picked up speed, and suddenly the entire thing banked hard to the side. Nicole, her fingers grabbing at her trousers like that was going to help, was squished into her seat — and out there, the sky flipped sideways and the City opened up to her eyes, its buildings grasping for the Traveler hovering just out of reach.

Grasping like her heart did.

* * *

**N**icole stood by the ship's hatch and stared morosely down at her feet. Her shoes had gotten cold during the flight. But the damp? That'd stayed. So now her feet weren't just wet but also chilled. Fantastic.

What was large scale tragedy without its small discomforts?

"Here you go," John said from over where he was kneeling in front of Bjarte, unclipping her harness — while the girl fumbled with the wrapping on a lollipop he'd given her.

Nicole curled her miserable toes. She watched a quiet exchange in Scandi, her mind limping along numbly, and tried to have thoughts of one form or the other that made sense.

Honestly? It was bizarre. Well, _everything_ was, but that was beside the point. _This_ was.

This. Right here. Right now.

Standing here, watching a man who'd pulled an alien creature through the air with nothing but freak space magic, only to smack it dead with his fist a beat later, be… a person. Hand out lollipops to kids. Talk in a low, soft tone. Muss up a little girl's already messy hair and get a big grin back in turn. Get up. Swipe his hands on his trousers. Trousers that were padded. Armoured. And had a wide, embroiled red sash clipped to the belt to fall down over his right hip which swung about lazily.

He smiled. Like an ordinary person. Walked like one, too. Right up to her, that smile never wavering, because everything was in perfect order.

"Ready to get off the ship?"

Horse-shite. Nothing was in order.

John stopped, his head cocking to the side while the smile fell away. And then he snapped his fingers in front of her nose. Two sharp cracks that made her nerves jump sideways.

"Hey, you in there?"

Was she? Or was she standing a foot off to the right of herself? An echo that'd gotten lost. She couldn't tell.

Ghost swung around between them, his shell ticking slowly. "Guardian? Sorry, she does that sometimes. Guuuaaardian?"

Nicole's eyes fixed on him, catching on his rear-fins ticking left and right and left and right — mimicking the long hand on an analogue clock jumping forward a second and then jumping right back.

Somehow, that managed to reel her in.

"What— ah. Yes. Yes, I'm ready. I think." She pushed at the bridge of her nose. Which was pointless, she didn't have any glasses to shove up, so she bunched her hands into the wide pockets of the too wide trousers instead. "I'm not sure. I think I need sleep."

"Mhm." John indicated the hatch with a nod. It began lowering as if on cue, the shift of air pressure tugging at her trouser-legs and sending a shiver up and down her arms. "At least you know you need sleep, that's a much better start than a lot of us get. I had no idea."

The hatch — now a ramp — set down with a quiet thump.

"Yes," Darrow threw in, angling himself to hover by John's left shoulder. So that was just a thing Ghosts did, was it? "Spite is not a sufficient sleep replacement, Shephard."

He shrugged. "It worked out okay. For a bit, anyway. But don't worry, _you_ we'll get to a bed ASAP."

. . .

What bed? She didn't even have clothes that were hers, let alone a _bed._ She did, in fact, not have a single bloody thing to her name. Nicole flexed her fingers inside the pockets of her borrowed trousers, squeezed her elbows to her side, and reluctantly trudged after the man in his wolf armour as he walked down the ramp.

* * *

**T**he hangar buzzed with excited energy.

Infectious, almost. Enough to tickle Ghost's circuits with a cautiously giddy jitter.

It was busy here. Loud. Full of life and noise and purpose.

Mechanics called for tools. An engine spooled up in one corner while another one spooled down. Machinery clinked and thumped and in-between all of it shuffled a bunch of frames, carrying everything from ammunition to spare parts meant for patching up banged up jumpships.

Which there wasn't ever a shortage of, because Guardians liked to bang up their ships almost as much as they liked painting them the most garish of colours once the scratches had been buffed out.

He shot his Guardian a quick look. What ship was she going to get assigned to? An Arcadian Class? A Kestrel? He tilted himself to the side and watched her stand in the shadow of the City Hawk's nose. She had her eyes turned down. Her hands hidden.

He shrunk a little.

In contrast, Bjarte was wide-eyed, her mouth half-open, and couldn't decide what to look at first. The ships? The people? The Guardians and their Ghosts? Then she saw a frame walking right by and immediately yanked on Shephard's Titan Mark, tugging the red sash as if to ring a bell, and pointed at it with her mouth going off at hundred miles per Scandi.

It hadn't occurred to him that she'd probably never seen robotics like that before, even though frames weren't exactly high tech. But out where she'd grown up you wanted tech to be as simple as possible. Helped with staying off Fallen scanners — and you couldn't keep the buggers charged anyway.

Though neither had his Guardian, he figured. And all _she_ did was glance at it, go very still, and promptly return her gaze to the floor.

This just kept on getting better, didn't it?

Guilt nudging him on, Ghost swung closer to her, trying to keep quiet at least until he modulated a soft _ha-hum_ to get her attention. She looked up.

"Welcome to the Tower," he said. "A lot of Guardians live here, close to the Vanguard operations and all that. Well. Not _here_ here. This is the Tower hangar, obviously. No one lives inside the hangar, that'd be odd. Except maybe Amanda Holliday, she's _always_ here and—"

His Guardian blinked at him and straightened her spine out a little. She looked almost ashen in the industrial shade. Her eyes were a bit puffy, too, with a shadow under them like she hadn't slept in years. "I get it. Hangar. Tower. What now? Do we go talk to your— ah—"

"To the Speaker," he added when her words trailed off. "Yes. We'll do that."

"Fantastic. I can't wait."

Sarcasm. Yeah. That.

Except then Shephard cleared his throat and there went not only her attention but also the hint of an attitude. Ghost's eye narrowed without his explicit permission to do so and he shook out his shell.

"I've got an idea," Shephard said and come up next to her, an arm extended like he was about to set it against her back to herd her along with him. To wherever that _idea_ was.

His Guardian's posture stiffened as she shuffled to the side.

Shephard's arm got the message and he resumed the same collected, disarming gestures he'd shown around her through the entire trip. Palms up. Disarming smile. Polite distance. And yet he terrified her. Ghost could tell. Shaking his shell out just a little he swung in to hover between them.

"How about we get you settled in first?"

"Settled in," she echoed.

"Mhmm. Get you registered. Moved in. To a bed and a shower, in whatever order you prefer. And if your Little Light puts together a report, Darrow and I can take that to the Speaker while you rest up and get your bearings."

Ghost's shell clicked together, but it was already too late to protest. His Guardian had heard it. And knowing his luck? How absolutely rotten it had been? She'd never un-hear it.

"Little… Light?" Her brow rocked up. Shephard, unhelpfully, pointed at him.

"_Don't,_" he muttered. "Don't call me that. Ever."

* * *

**S**omehow, leaving the hangar made Nicole feel even smaller. Maybe it was the overbearing presence of the Traveler looming over the City — hanging there to her left like that stranger whose name she couldn't remember waiting for her to shake their hand.

Or the din of voices. The colours. The people milling about, a lot of who were trailed by what she could only imagine were their Ghosts. Not one looked quite like the other.

And not all the _people_ were… people.

"You're making this up," Darrow said sharply, pulling her attention away from two men having an animated discussion. They had metal masks for faces. With horns on them. And their mouths were… flashing. One orange. One purple.

"Am not," Ghost protested.

"Then that leaves the only other possible conclusion: You're inept at taking readings and all this data is useless. I don't know why I'm even _trying._"

"It's not useless. It just— doesn't make much sense right now. I mean, look at this! Have you seen a Guardian's Light do this before? Ever? I haven't."

Nicole's steps slowed as she watched the two Ghosts float side by side, rounding at each other like bickering birds. They were talking about her. Obviously.

"Hey, you two," John said. He landed a hand on her elbow at the same time, tugging her away from them and ever onwards. "How about using your inside voices, huh?"

The Ghosts snapped their eyes at him, wiggled their shells, and fell silent. Their eyes kept pulsing though. Like mouths moving without words coming out.

Nicole huffed, pulled her elbow out from John's soft grip, and threw him a look of her own. A cautious one.

"Exos," he said. "Those are Exos." He jutted his head into the direction of the two men with their metal faces. "Some time during the Golden Age we got crazy enough and figured out how to upload a human conscience into artificial bodies."

_We what._

Since John kept walking, she tried to keep pace. And not to stare, though that wasn't working out too well, least until she felt a tug on her elbow. John pulled her aside, correcting her course just in time before she walked right into a woman.

A woman with grey-blue skin. Galaxies pulled underneath it, swirling like they were being spun into cotton candy. Her hair was long and a dark purple and there was a glow in her pale eyes.

When they'd passed her, Nicole snapped her eyes to John. "Her skin is blue," she stated dumbly. Least she felt dumb for saying it. It'd been a lot more than _blue._

"Mhm. She's an Awoken. They're — ah — okay this is a little more complicated. Let's say they used to be human and aren't quite any more."

"Awoken."

"Awoken," he repeated.

Her head spun. Spun all the way the rest of their way until he led her through an automatic sliding door, out from under the Traveler's stare and the din of voices, and into a quiet, cool hallway. A worn-down carpet muffled their footsteps here and paintings lined grey walls, some of fantastic alien landscapes, others of more familiar features, and others yet of people — and Exos and Awoken. Most were accompanied by Ghosts, not one of them with an identical design. Ghosts and paintings alike. Like a collage of children's drawings hung in a hospital ward, except not by, well, children.

Speaking of Ghosts.

One zipped down the hall into their direction. A white one, just like… ah… hers. Except without the scratch marks, the dents, and the tape. It dove between them, making both John and her lean to the side, and headed for the door at the end of the hall. Though before it left, it twirled around, paused, and looked at them. Its eye blew out like a cat's, flicked from John to her, then Ghost — until eventually landing back on her, where the eye stayed long enough to make her neck itch.

So she lifted a hand and scratched at it.

The Ghost's shell gave a twirl and it left, vanishing in a puff of light a second before it hit the door.

* * *

**T**he room Shephard took them to was at the end of a journey so long, Ghost hadn't thought he'd ever get there.

The Guardian register. How amazingly fantastic and cool and wonderful was that?

He almost forgot how impossibly annoyed he was with Darrow through all the anticipation wanting to overload his circuits. A sentiment the lone registrar sitting behind one of the three counters at the back of the room didn't share. He was asleep. Had his legs up on the counter, ankles crossed, and… snored.

Ghost bristled. John cleared his throat.

The registrar jolted awake. His legs flew off the counter while he spluttered a few apologies and looked between them. He even leaned forward and around the counter to get a look at Bjarte, who stared back at him with a stoic little frown.

"Good _morning,_" Shephard said and nudged his Guardian forward, placing her in front of the registrar. "I found you a Kinderguardian."

His Guardian's eyes widened briefly. But aside of that she resembled a lone bucket floating upside down in the sea somewhere. Adrift and very lost.

The registrar sat straighter though and adjusted his City uniform.

"Right on. One Guardian registration. Of course." Then he sat there and quietly glanced between Darrow and Ghost.

"Your turn, buddy," Shephard said and suddenly Ghost realised he had absolutely no idea how this entire thing went down.

He shimmied forward carefully and fixed himself by his Guardian's left shoulder.

"I see, hello." The registrar grabbed a screen hanging off to the side on an extendable arm and pulled it over to himself so he could tap at it with quick fingers. "Name?"

Ghost exchanged a look with his Guardian.

"Hers," the registrar clarified when neither answered. "And if you haven't found one yet we have some inspirational material available should you need it."

"Nicole Brennan," she said. "That's Brennan with two ns in the middle. One at the end." Almost like she'd had to say that a lot back in her old life.

The registrar squinted at her and then threw Shephard a chiding sort of glance. "Has your Ghost been handing out real names again, Sir?"

Shephard threw his hands up in mock surrender. "Don't look at me. We're innocent."

Ghost's core wanted to shrivel. Mercifully enough, Darrow remained quiet.

"Of course." The registrar didn't sound convinced but returned to work.

So Ghost leaned closer to his Guardian and whispered: "This'll only take a moment. I think."

Her lips twitched and she pulled her elbows closer to herself.

"It _does_ only take a moment," the registrar said maybe a little too loudly as he caught a data chip ejecting from a console with enough force to propel it into the air. He pushed it over the counter and fixed him with a stare.

"These are your keys. You know; vault codes, decryption code libraries, transmat permissions. We're also including startup funds for arms and armour. And rent. Speaking of accommodations…"

He turned back to the screen while his Guardian stared blankly at the data chip.

"You don't need to worry about any of that," Ghost said quickly and flicked a data hook over the chip to download everything he needed. And while his processes were busy installing all the new routines, Shephard leaned over the counter and snatched the corner of the registrar's screen. He flipped it to him, and Ghost saw a bunch of tables with the data in their rows and columns either red or green.

Shephard hummed and then tapped his fingers on one of the green ones. It pulsed briefly.

"This one," he said and flipped the screen back to the registrar, who, much to Ghost's surprise, looked only mildly put off by having his work interrupted like this.

Then he shrugged. "Sure thing, Sir."

And that was that.

His Guardian was all set. She got _her_ keys, too, a slim data card with a sector and door number printed at the top, which she picked up gingerly and vanished into her pants pockets — along with her hand.

This. Was. _It._

Ghost almost blew his shell off his core as it flared out and spun wildly at the back. He was now an officially bonded Ghost. Had a Guardian. A _Guardian._ Officially. Records and all.

He chittered excitedly and rolled once around her shoulders, earning himself a quizzical look.

Oh yeah. She wasn't as excited about this as he was. And when the registrar said: "Welcome to the Last City, Guardian," her face managed to fall even more.

Though she did manage a quiet "Thank you."

Baby steps. Kinderguardian steps? Hm.

And while he pondered that, Shephard clapped his hands together. "Alright," he said. "I've got it from here. You hungry?"

His Guardian shuffled away from the counter, seemingly deep in thought about the complexity of the question she'd just been asked and at a loss on how to tackle it.

Which was okay. "Starving," Ghost said for her.

A guess. Really. An educated one. Probably. Or maybe more of a downward dragging sensation? Ghost leaned a precise five degrees left. So yeah, about that neural link? How was he going to break that to her again?

Shephard threw him a look. "Oh, so that's how it's going to be with you two. That's cool, I can work with that. Come on then, let's pick up some grub on the way."

He gestured them to follow and headed back out.

His Guardian sighed but trudged after him.

* * *

**T**akeout was still a thing.

So was ramen and fried rice and garlic peas, all served out of a shop in a narrow alley overhung by neon billboards, long strips of colourful cloth, and thick-leaved vines.

Under it all, the air was heavy with heady spices layered over the scents of roasted meats and fresh baked goods. And it convinced Nicole's stomach to threaten her with devouring itself if she didn't throw anything in there soon. So she stood there off to the side and stared at John chucking glinting blue dice cubes onto the counter. She blinked. The things rolled like dice ought to and were promptly scooped up by the cook — who readily traded him two large paper bags.

"Glimmer," he said when he'd rejoined her. Hopefully not by reading her mind and more so reading her blatant staring. Like Ghost has probably just known she hadn't eaten for too long and guessed, right?

John offered one of the bags. She took it. Slowly.

"Glimmer," Nicole echoed. "Exo. Awoken. Frames?"

Her eyes flicked to a skeletal robot standing by the ramen and rice shop. It held a broom and was herding a pile of shrivelled up leaves off the path.

"Yep. See, you'll get a hang of this in no time."

Nicole's stomach sidestepped the comment. Even dodged thoughts of the food, suddenly losing all interest in it while it fretted over how to pay him back for the food and if _she_ had glimmer and if not how was she going to get it?

She chewed on that thought for a while and followed him through the rest of the alley, staying right behind him to avoid any and all possible collisions. Why was that glimmer stuff shaped like cubes anyway? And why was it _glimmering._ And how did you tell how much it was worth? Did it come in different sizes?

When had _coins_ gone out of fashion?

Or credit cards.

Was this her first debt?

She _hated_ being in debt. Debts were stupid.

"What do I owe you for the, ah. Food?" _And the rescue, do I owe you anything for the rescue?_

John threw a look over his shoulder. "Nothing."

Nothing. Nothing wasn't ever really nothing though, was it? Nothing was an expectation that you figured out what you owed yourself and if you didn't you weren't paying enough attention.

"Though I'll probably want to reclaim my shirt and pants at some point," he added after he'd turned forward again.

. . .

Nicole's neck promptly melted off her shoulders. That was to say everything from her neck to her cheeks got really, really hot. To the point where she choked a noise, tightened her grip on the handle of her paper bag, and glanced away. Anywhere but at his back or his shoulders or anything attached to him, really.

Right at three white Ghosts.

Did that make them a flock? A flock of Ghosts? You know, like birds. Or was it a school? A school of Ghosts because they didn't have wings and kind of had fins, so were they flying or swimming in the air?

Either way, they came darting down from between the gently wafting banners and the thick leaves, their shells a flurry of movement. Curious movement. Deliberate. And they followed them, inching closer and closer while John led them out of the alley.

They only stopped once he'd marched them through a large metal gate sitting between walls covered in a delicate, white mosaic. And even then they hung by the gate until it fell shut.

Staring.

* * *

"**A**nd here we are."

John stopped by one of the doors lining a quiet hallway smelling oddly of roses. Or maybe not so oddly. They'd climbed down a winding staircase to get here, one built into an open shaft that let in plenty of fresh air from above. It'd felt old. Reclaimed, almost. Especially with the wild roses crawling all over the iron-wrought railing.

She'd almost gotten pricked.

"Go on," he said. "Open it up."

For a while, Nicole stood there, dumbfounded, and didn't know what to do. She couldn't think of roses and glimmer and Guardians and Ghosts at the same time as considering locked doors. John didn't seem bothered though. The small smile he carried certainly didn't fall off.

Then she remembered. Key. Keycard. Pocket.

"Right. That. I got it." She fished it out, frowned at it, and tentatively waved the thing over what looked like a keypad without buttons worked into the wall next to the door. Green lights flashed briefly and the door made a soft but satisfying _CLACK_.

And that was when John's smile gave way to a curious frown.

Nicole cleared her throat. "Electronic keycards aren't that fancy," she said and carefully nudged the door open. "We already had them for a while."

"Huh," was all he had to say to that.

And then Bjarte hugged her. It was really very sudden and almost made her drop her paper bag. It was also very tight. If anything, Nicole worried she'd never let go and how'd either of them ever get on with her life like that?

"I think she likes you," John said, the smile back in full force.

"What'll happen to her?" Nicole asked, both her arms awkwardly held up and keeping the paper bag from knocking into Bjarte's head. "I mean, now that she's here."

"I'll take her to someone who'll be able to look after her. The City is used to handling orphans and getting them settled in." He frowned. "Unfortunately."

"Ah. Okay."

"_But_ she'll be fine." There it was again. The smile. Like flipping a switch, not missing a beat. "Thanks to you she'll get another chance at this. You should be proud, you know."

Nicole's mouth twisted down. Funny that. She wasn't. But she nodded anyway, which seemed to be enough — whether he bought it or not.

A few words in Scandi later and the vice grip around her hips lifted, leaving behind a wash of cold.

"Ghost," John said, and her Ghost practically sprang to attention, his banged-up shell sorting itself into perfectly straight angles. "You know where to find me if you two need anything."

Ghost bobbed up and down in a brief nod.

"Great."

And before she could finally say the words she ought to have said hours ago — _Thank you?_ — he'd already walked off.

Nicole fidgeted on the spot and stared. No. She was definitely not going to shout them.

* * *

**T**he door clicked shut. The lights came on. And Nicole stood in a stubby hallway barely long enough for a single step, surrounded by a stifling silence.

Not the sort of silence you had out in the wild — where owls hooted, gnats buzzed, leaves whistled, and Fallen shot up the air. Or the one in an aircraft. Airship. Ship. Tomato. Tom_ah_to. No, not that either. _Actual_ silence.

Suddenly, and awfully, she expected the click-clack-click-clack of dog paws coming around a corner to greet her. They didn't. All she had were the occasional clicks and whirrs of Ghost's shell.

Puffing out a shaky sigh like venting a puff of steam from a burst of anger boiling up in her guts, she walked herself forward and out into a wide but narrow room.

She let it sink in.

On the right was a low bed with simple grey covers on it and a pillow so flat it almost blended into the mattress. At its foot stood a metal crate, the latches on it flipped open. And there were shelves. Empty ones. And a desk that'd lost its chair.

Everything was barren. Like life had occupied this space once and then moved on. Leaving nothing. Which, really, was probably exactly what'd happened here so the poetry was unnecessary.

She looked left. At the… kitchen? Kitchenette? The plating on one of the two counters there looked like a stovetop anyway and the box standing in a corner gave off distinct fridge vibes.

For a dinner table, she had a stubby board mounted high on a wall with two high chairs tucked under it. That was what she walked up to and put the paper bag on before gingerly opening it up and peering inside.

When the smell of savoury food hit her, her stomach decided it'd rather not. It shrivelled up, turned violently, and then tried to crawl up her throat.

She swallowed it back down. No way she could eat now. Or ever again. If she did, she'd throw up, and so she stuffed the bag into the fridge and tried to forget about it.

"This is— ah— it's a nice place, yeah?" Ghost said. He was tumbling up and down the room, eyeballing everything a lot more closely than she had.

Nicole slipped the tip of her tongue between her teeth and bit down on it.

"It's a lot bigger than I expected," he continued. "Oh, look, there's a bathroom." He went up in light and vanished through a brick-red curtain in the corner between the kitchen and the outside wall — a wall that was all curtain, too. A thick army green blackout curtain.

"It has a shower." He kept on going, his voice muffled as he described it in its entirety, while Nicole grabbed the blackout curtain by the end and began pulling it to the side.

The moment light fell into the room, the ceiling-mounted bulbs went out. And there was a lot of light, because the entire wall was one large window overlooking the city. Which meant she got a face-full of Traveler.

For a moment, she thought she stood at that stranger's grave. The one she ought to know. The one she couldn't remember in life and hadn't known had ever died.

Nicole held on to the curtain, thinking if she didn't, she'd fall to her knees and never again rise. She stood like that. Felt her heart labour.

_Tha-thump. The-thump. Tha-tha-thump._

It didn't quit.

"So this is real," she said.

_Click. Whirr._ Her left ear itched and she glanced that way. Ghost was back.

"_You_ are real."

His top fin, the one with the tape on, fell forward a little. "Yes, I am," he said, his voice subdued. "Very real."

"I don't want it to be real." The words came out choked.

His shell ticked and he looked away.

"Can't you _undo_ it?"

His eye snapped back to her.

"Can't you just leave me dead?" She shivered. A single, cold note— no more than a slice of the song that'd haunted her —rang against her spine.

"I— I—" He looked down. Then left. Then right. When he finally fixed his eye on her again, every section of his shell drooped. Like they'd gotten heavier. "I could. If you really want me to, I could. But please, **please** give it a few days before you throw this away."

He inched closer. Nicole's heart laboured on.

"That's all I'm asking. A few days here in the City. No heroics. No God slaying. No slaying of any kind. There's — ah — there's _more_ to being a Guardian than that. Yes. More. Way more. Please. Just a few days."

"Why is this so important to you?"

He recoiled an inch. "Your being a Guardian aside, what you're asking me to do is to let you _die._"

"Because I'm supposed to be _dead._ Like everyone I know."

"You're not any more," he said, his tone pleading.

"You don't even _know_ me," she shot back. "Why would you care? Just go find someone else." She gestured vaguely out across the city. "Someone who wants this or doesn't remember they don't."

"I care because you're here. You're here and you're alive and _you_ are why _I'm_ here. You. No one else. Finding you is all I've been doing ever since I've come to.

"I care because I was _made_ for you. _Because_ of you. A Ghost is nothing alone. Without you, without my Guardian, I'm a bucket that's made for water but never gets to carry any. Or paper that never sees a pen. Or a… a… key without a lock. A… sock without a foot."

His shell puffed out and his words dimmed, along with the steady pulse of his eye as he talked.

"And it doesn't matter how you chose to live your second life. Whatever you decide, I'll never abandon you. I'll stay with you, whether you want to pick up gardening in the City, join a Fireteam, or sort books at a library. I won't. Ever. Leave. You."

A hard knot had lodged itself in her throat. She'd have liked to cough it up, but all it did was grow and grow and grow until she barely managed to squeeze some words around it.

"A few days," she said.

Ghost bobbed up and down. "Just a few days."

* * *

End

Book 1: Eyes Up, Guardian

Next up

_**Book 2: Rubik's Cube**_


	14. Book 2: Rubik's Cube

**Taffer Notes: **And we continue with Book 2, in which you can expect the following:

* Lots of slice and life.  
* Training montages.  
* A Guardian not wanting.  
* A Ghost very much wanting.  
* And a little bit of romance and murder mystery.

Beta read and edited with the help of the wonderful Maverick-Werewolf.

**Content Warning:** Suicidal Ideation

* * *

The Last City isn't home. Her Light is wrong. But her Ghost insists she gives him time. Time to make her see she's meant for this. And while Nicole struggles to accept her second chance at life, the Vanguard has struggles of its own: Murders. Guardians and their Ghosts have turned up dead within the walls, their Light ripped from them and their bodies no more than empty husks.

* * *

**Book 2: **

**Rubik's Cube**

* * *

**Chapter 1 Cold Feet**

* * *

**L**ight pours into the kitchen. It lances through a gap between the flower-specked curtains, bright and warm and filled with dancing flecks of gold. A merry display of something careless. Lively.

Yet, at the end, the gold is nothing but dust pretending at worth.

The beams of light touch the kitchen table, but none of it touches her. She sits at the end of the table, withdrawn from the light and ringed in shade.

She cries.

Cries. And cries. Can't remember when she started. And she dreads she'll never stop.

In front of her lies a sheet of paper. Words sit on it. Most beg for forgiveness. None make a lot of sense. The pen she's been writing them with lies on the floor, thrown in a fit of disgust.

_Click-click-click_ come the soft touches of dog claws on the floor. They bring bone-deep guilt. For a moment, she's glad she's thrown the pen away. A wet nose wedges itself up between her knees under the table. A tail swats slowly against another chair.

She wails and sinks her hands into his fur.

"I'm sorry," she says with words that barely find a voice. "I'm sorry. I'm okay. I'm okay."

She repeats the mantra until her phone rings, singing a familiar tune of a wayward son supposed to carry on. Good on him. She'd really rather not. The phone buzzes on the table.

_Rattle-rattle-rattle_

Gets louder. And louder. And louder. Until, in a blink, the familiar tune dies, turns to a memory of yesterday. Instead, she's filled with notes sung from the beaks of birds that come twisted out of cruel metal.

In her hands, the dog turns to dust.

Nicole falls.

She falls until the black wolf rises from the dark. Its eyes are fires. Green fires. They burn the darkness and they burn her and when its jaws open, it swallows her whole.

* * *

**H**is Guardian woke up screaming.

Ghost came to with a start. He lifted off the shelf he'd been resting on and twirled once, scanning for threats. He found nothing, of course. Nothing but a trace of confused Void Light which dissipated even as he tried to get a better read.

And then he— _THUNK_ —smacked into the shelf above.

All of that, the getting jolted awake and hitting his shell so hard it rattled, hadn't taken longer than half a second. Which meant nobody had seen it. Right? No one. At all. Rustling his shell back in order, he rolled out from between the shelves and took a proper look around.

The apartment was empty. Naturally. Well, safe for him and his Guardian. And whatever ghosts (remember, small g) she'd dreamt up at the tail end of her one hour and twenty-three-minute nap. She sat bolt upright in the bed, the sheets bunched up in her lap. With one hand she grabbed her chest. With the other she squeezed the life out of her pillow, staying like that long enough for him to slowly float towards her.

A mistake, as it turned out.

She froze the moment she noticed him, a miserable noise building in her chest that made his core want to crumble. And then she flung the covers aside, dashed through the room, and vanished into the bathroom to — ah — dry-heave. Yeah. Dry-heave. She didn't have anything in her worth throwing up any more.

Ghost drooped.

_Dear Traveler,_ he narrated, sullen from core to fin tip, and drifted over to the fridge. _What's your return policy on defective Ghosts?_

A flick of a transmat beam and he had the food stuffed in his buffer.

_My people protocols aren't working._

One more and it materialised neatly on the table, right on time for his Guardian to duck under the bathroom curtain, her arms up and hands busy tying her hair. It turned into a lopsided tail that stuck out to one side. There, her hair dangled as morosely as he felt.

Ghost gave an encouraging sideways roll. But he _tried._ "Dinner?"

Her mouth twisted. She swallowed. Though eventually then she nodded and sat at the table, facing the blackout curtains. As if she expected them to part and eat her. Or maybe— maybe she wanted to see the City?

It was really pretty at night. She'd like it. Everyone did.

"What time is it?"

"Seven-fifteen," he said and zipped over to the curtains. He wedged himself up against the top, right under the rail, and shoved forward to push one half open. In spilled the Traveler's light, pale and gentle. Along with it came pretty hues of pink from the setting sun getting the clouds all flushed, and below it winked the colourful lights of the City itself. Whole rivers of them moved between the buildings, a steady flow of traffic that never truly slept.

The Last City was a heart that beat relentlessly.

"I didn't sleep a lot, did I," she half asked, half stated, while her eyes were set on the Traveler. In one hand she held two chopsticks. A bunch of cold noodles dangled from them, equally could soup dripping back into the takeaway bowl. Of course they'd had chopsticks back before the Golden Age. He'd known that.

Totally.

"No." Ghost shimmied himself closer to her. "Did you have a nightmare?"

A nod.

"Anything, ah, specific?"

"My dog died," she said flatly. "Turned to dust."

By the Light, if he had a foot it'd be _so_ far up his mouth. A mouth he had to grow first, too.

She slurped down some noodles though. Progress. Right?

"Then I got eaten by a black wolf the size of a moon."

He froze up. "Psht. You don't still think—"

"I don't know what I _think,_" she shot at him.

Ghost sorted his shell with a few faint clicks and glanced away.

"Don't— don't make me think," she added after a while. "I don't want to think."

* * *

**M**uch as she'd have liked not to think, it was really all Nicole could do while she ate the rest of the cold ramen in silence. It tasted alright, at least. And she could keep it down, even if that had been a little touch and go at first.

The rice she put back into the fridge.

Didn't take long after that and she found herself pacing. Around her, the flat's plain walls crept in on her. Inch by inch. Much like the noose that fastened around her throat and pulled ever tighter.

She looked at the door. Then at the window, with that bleached ball hanging out there to remind her how real all of this was. Not like Ghost gave her a chance at forgetting, not with how he was always… there.

Never not.

A constant presence, his electronic clicks and whirrs filled the place up. And that didn't help with how small it'd already become. Heat welled at the base of her clenching throat. Frustration. Anger. Boiling like awful soup made of rotten leftovers. She clenched her fists and was a second from snapping, when he rolled right in front of her, the red tape catching her eye.

She exhaled. Flexed her fingers. The heat died. Slowly.

"Do you want to go out?" he asked.

Nicole started on the spot.

"Out?"

"Mhm," he intoned with a convincing hum. "Stretch your legs some. See the City. Shop! Do you like shopping?"

"I— I don't much care for it."

Right as she'd said it, Ghost sunk half an inch.

"But isn't it a little late for that anyway?"

"Pfah. The City _never_ sleeps."

She ran her hands down her sides. Along the borrowed shirt that John had said he'd want back. Shop? She could use clothes. It'd be nice to have something of her own. Something that fit. And new shoes. But that left the question of—

"What am I going to pay with though?"

Ghost leaned himself a little to the side. Thinking. Counting?

"You've got enough to get started with. All we need is to swing by a vault terminal to pick up some glimmer."

"Glimmer. Right. That. Silly me. How'd I forget that."

She swiped the keycard up where she'd left it on the kitchen table, stuffed it into her trousers, and went out the door.

The hallway still smelled of roses. It came with an idea of something wild, but yet decidedly soft. Brought a memory, clear as day, of a shaded, narrow path following an old fence.

"Ah— Guardian?"

Except she'd walk Thor there and not a floating, opinionated voice-box.

"You— ah— Guardian, you forgot something." He swung around her head, his eye swinging back and forth from her to the door.

Huffing, Nicole ignored him and kept walking. No. No, she would absolutely _not_ put those minky shoes back on. Socks would have to do, even if her feet were already getting cold.

Except where was she going again? She stopped at the ancient-looking winding staircase. Reasonable sleepers as they were, the wild roses had turned their blooms into pink snooze pods, though that didn't keep them from sticking out against the backdrop of green.

"Down?" She asked.

"Down," he said and zipped on ahead.

* * *

**T**wo elevator rides later, Nicole was dreadfully lost. And fighting a losing battle against a particular case of sensory overload. The last elevator had spat them out near a plaza. A plaza that hung down the sloping side of the massive wall ringing the city in. It reminded her of a shelf. One fairly far down, what with how the bleached wall rose up high and high and higher over her. But still far enough up that she decided not to walk to the edge. Ever.

The tops of tall buildings rose to meet it. Two were even tall enough to rise _over_ it and those two had bridges leading right on over to the plaza-shelf.

And it was all very… noisy.

Gathered under the Traveler's glow and the flash of neon light signs lining the plaza, were all manners of people. And not quite people. There were even a few trees with neatly cropped patches of grass around them, paper lanterns dangling from their branches.

It was busy. Full of life. Buzzing, vivid nightlife.

There was the obligatory music roaming out from some wide open doors, all equally alien to her and all equally vying for her attention. People came and went — or just stood there, hanging out in small groups.

Nicole hugged her elbows close and followed Ghost to a corner.

The walls all around here were either white plaster or the same mosaic she'd seen everywhere else. Full of colour and with patterns on them that didn't quite fit any culture she could remember. Or maybe it fit too many at once. Bit like the music. All mashed together from things that were meant to be familiar, but at the end weren't.

In the corner Ghost led her to stood a row of narrow terminals. He buzzed in front of one, a burst of light connecting with its screen, and while he did whatever it was he did, Nicole's eyes wandered.

She stood there, and from her gut unravelled a halfway ordinary sensation.

A sort of gentle nudge of the unfamiliar. The weightless, inconsequential strangeness she'd felt every time she'd left an airport at too-late-o'clock. Groggy, but not quite tired, with the air maybe too humid. Or too dry. Too hot. Or too cold. The bottom line was that it was different. That the cars were probably bigger. Shinier. And the people followed a different fashion trend than what Scotland was currently obsessed with.

It was that same out-of-place that came with sitting in a cab while a city rolled by that wasn't quite what you'd seen before, scents spilling through the cracked window that weren't quite what you were used to, and the radio playing music that wasn't quite what you'd expect.

Because travel far enough, even the grass under your feet ends up different. And right now she thought she stood on that strange grass, disconnected from her life. If she closed her eyes and pretended, she might even have been able to imagine herself in a resort by a beach, tucked away on the balcony of her room while an eternal party happened somewhere nearby.

"Guardian?"

Nicole swallowed and spooled her thoughts back in. When she looked over her shoulder, Ghost floated over a pile of blue, glimmering cubes on the surface of the terminal.

"Handful of glimmer for your thoughts?"

She frowned and moseyed over, coming to a halt with her hands awkwardly hovering over the pile.

"I just had the weirdest feeling," she admitted, "like I flew out for a vacation somewhere strange."

"Vacation?" Click, his shell went. Whirr-whirr. "Ah— it's fine to put the Glimmer in a pocket. It's not heavy."

Nodding more to herself than him, she carefully scooped it all up and stuffed it into her borrowed trouser pockets. In her hands, the glimmer felt warm. Bit like holding statically charged feathers, rather than the glowing dice she'd expected from how it'd rolled on the counter when John had paid for the food.

"Yeah. Vacation." She patted her trousers down. Tried to flatten the glimmer bulge. "Booked a plane to somewhere… else. Somewhere totally out there. Not… missed the entire apocalypse by means of the shoddiest time travel method ever." She threw him a look. "Dying, by the way. That's dying. Shite way to time travel."

He regarded her with a slow shutter — or blink — of his eye.

"What? Please don't tell me time travel is a thing."

"It— ah— the Vex can sort of do it? Travel through time? _I_ don't know how it works. Honestly, I don't know if anyone does at this point, but—"

"Stop." Nicole pinched the bridge of her nose. "What about _please don't tell me_ did you not hear you daft, floaty bawbag?"

He pulled back, his shell puffed out, and rotated his fins quick enough to turn the red tape into a blurred line. "I thought you were being sarcastic."

"Was not," she muttered, and sorted herself back together to face the plaza.

* * *

_**D**__ear Traveler,_

_I made my Guardian mad. Again. I also don't know what a bawbag is, but I get the feeling I don't want to find out._

Did he blame her though? No. Of course he didn't. He'd listened but he hadn't _listened_. Which, as it turned out, made this particular Speck of Light into a bawbag and earned him a shoulder so cold, he was now more convinced than ever that she favoured the icy touch of Void Light.

Even if she'd almost set him on fire once. And had burnt her coat.

She didn't say another word for the longest time after that, either. But she followed him. Padded after him with her elbows hugged close to her and her steps tentative. Her eyes wandered though. So much, he was worried she'd not see where she was going. In fact, she absolutely didn't and he had to chirp at her more than once and get right up into her face to stop her from either walking into a railing, a lamp post, or into another Guardian. Like right now.

"That's a Hunter," Ghost told her when she stared. "Hard to miss. See the cape? It's a Hunter tradition that's made it all the way into their civvies. A lot of them will wear one no matter where."

This Hunter in particular, a human, was in the middle of showing off. With a snap of his finger, he summoned a burning dagger, right into his hand — and then flipped it up into the night sky where it trailed embers and flames and quite a few stares. Including his Guardian's, who tracked the brightly burning dagger with wide eyes. When the dagger came back down it landed on the Hunter's outstretched finger, where it balanced for a second before dissipating.

The Hunter's friends hooted. One clapped him on the shoulder. Another offered him a shot-glass filled with something vile (or so Ghost guessed), which the Hunter promptly downed before taking a bow with a flourish so over the top it made his cape snap like a whip.

Then he repeated the trick.

Ghost rolled his eye. This was going to end with someone getting burnt. Horribly. But that was going to be a different Ghost's problem. Not his. _He_ had a Guardian with the spatial awareness of a water bottle to worry about.

Except for when she was throwing bricks at him.

"Anyway," he said. "Clothes. Shoes. You need shoes. There are a few shops across the north bridge."

At the mention of a bridge, her steps faltered. He could practically feel the spike of fear glancing off him. From there it turned into a subtle, nervous jitter that followed them all the way across the bridge.

* * *

**T**he bridge was windy. Chilly. Enough to make her shiver all the way across. Overhead, lanterns swayed gently, their lights moving in large, lazy circles. She hated that. Hated it so much she held her breath behind clenched teeth, half expecting the bridge to simply turn over and dump her into the dark.

It didn't though.

It held.

On the other side, things didn't look much different. The architecture remained undecided if it wanted to be blocky and industrial, or rather be rich with colour and full of intricate curves — but it was all a lot tighter. Narrow. And full of small, cramped shops. None of which had ever grown any doors, she noticed.

Like no one had to worry about thieves.

They were all wide open at the front, their stuff on display all the way out into the path where you were supposed to walk and it made her think more of a market than anything.

The building itself was more of a tube, really. Hollow in the middle with a hole up top. Nicole, naturally, did not approach the railing. Not even to sate a moment of curiosity asking just how far up or down this market went and if she'd discovered the tallest vertical mall ever.

No, she hung by the shops and wandered. Aimlessly, mostly, not really paying much attention to what was being sold. Sometimes Ghost would stop and look inside one, then throw _her_ a look like he wanted her to stop with him, but she kept walking.

Clothes. Scarfs. Rugs. Furniture. Pretty glass and intricately wrought iron thingie-ma-things. Nonsense. _Some_ sense. Food (her stomach clenched). Flowers.

She stopped at that one, caught in the cloud of sweet and earthy scents. While she stood there and stared, Ghost's electronic clicks and whirrs slunk closer. Eventually, he inched all the way around her shoulder and peered into the shop alongside her.

At the back of it, past so many plants fighting for shelf space, a woman looked up, her fingers stuck in a pot of dark earth. Blue fingers. Connecting to a blue wrist. And blue arms, with wispy, glinting clouds flowing under their skin like rivers. An Awoken.

Nicole clenched her jaw and kept walking.

Ghost caught up quickly.

She didn't stop wandering until the cold against the soles of her feet finally began to hurt in earnest. And even then she stood dumbly at the entrance of the first suitable shop for a while, like walking in there was going to be harder than anything she'd had to do so far.

Except instead of running from _Fallen_, she'd be battling jackets and trousers and shirts — while skirts and dresses dug her grave. She made a face. This was stupid.

_She_ was being stupid. Making an arse out of herself, really. She looked a right mess standing there in a shirt way too large and tents for trousers and no bloody shoes. So why wasn't she just going in?

When some cheerfully coloured dresses at the back parted for a grey haired woman, the cloth hangers softly clinking on their rails, Nicole almost bolted. She even turned around and made to walk, but Ghost got in the way. He swung in front of her, his shell pushed out. When she moved half a step, he scooted closer.

He squinted.

Nicole huffed, threw her hands halfway up, and relented.

The insides of the shop smelled like lavender. Not _mothball_ intense lavender, but a walk along a lavender dotted path kind of… lavender.

"How can I help you, Guardian?" the grey haired lady said and came right up to her carrying a smile.

_Guardian._ Nicole's lips dragged down. She side-eyed Ghost. He was a dead giveaway, wasn't he? What with how he hovered around her like she'd grown a small moon.

Not that the woman needed her to answer. Her eyes flicked up and down, measuring Nicole from the tips of her dirty socks all the way up to her shoulders. Nicole, in turn, stood a teensy bit straighter. And felt exponentially worse.

_Ah-ha,_ the woman intoned, knowingly, and gestured her to follow. "How about we get started with a pair of shoes?"

* * *

**W**alking back was halfway more comfortable, even if her new shoes pinched a tad around the ankles. They were still _shoes_. The jacket helped too, adding a bit of weight to her shoulders and keeping the chill out. And that was a start.

But a start for what, really? Start at having something that wasn't borrowed? Start at normalcy?

What normalcy?

Nicole chewed on her bottom lip while she dragged her feet across the bridge, hard at work ignoring thoughts about long drops to sudden stops. Rather, she tried to focus on the weight of the bags in her hands, hefting them up a little. Two pairs of trousers. Lots of knickers. More socks. Bunch of shirts. She'd spent almost all the glimmer Ghost had gotten for her and that'd been nearly as embarrassing as walking in there in the first place.

"You okay?"

Nicole's teeth dug a little deeper and she looked up. Ghost hung real close, eyeing her.

"No," she said without hesitation. "And this was mortifying."

His shell twisted left, then right. "You did great."

"I did _great_? Shopping? I couldn't even count the glimmer, Ghost. At least with coinage and different currencies you got numbers stamped on and the worst that can happen is not knowing what way the exchange rate swings. How do you learn to count _cubes_?"

"Well— ah—" he started, swinging his eye over her shoulder and then back at her. "That's what you have _me_ for. I count them for you until you've figured it out."

"What if I don't?"

"You will," he said. "_We_ will. It'll work out, I promise." And then his eye flicked away again, right over her shoulder and back to the bridge she'd _just_ walked off of. He shimmied backwards, his trajectory a little wobbly, and Nicole finally gave in to look back too.

Four Ghosts floated under the lantern light of the bridge. They moved in a tight group as they inched along — and for a moment they reminded Nicole of a group of whispering children.

Ghost— _her_ Ghost —cleared his theoretical throat.

"Ignore them," he said and swung forward, scooting ahead. "That's what I've been doing."

"Yeah? How's that working out?"

"Poorly," he admitted. "Want to go home?"

Nicole flinched. Home. That. That thing she'd lost.

But she nodded anyway. Even if that, too, worked out somewhat poorly.


	15. Breakfast

**Taffer Notes: **Content Warning for referenced suicide

* * *

**I**n which no one really gets what they want.

* * *

**Chapter 2: Breakfast**

* * *

**S**he tossed. She turned. She dreamt of waking from a nightmare so vivid, no one was ever going to believe her — only for the nightmare to be real, and her waking the dream.

Deja vu, that.

But mostly, she laid flat on the too hard mattress and stared at the ceiling, wrapped up in all that suffocating silence broken only when Ghost moved.

Click.

Whirr.

_ Whirr._

_** Whirr.**_

Nicole clenched her jaw. Hard enough to hurt and hard enough to get Ghost's attention.

"Guardian? You okay?"

She rolled her head to the side on that _stupid_ flat pillow and when she looked, Ghost's blue eye caught her straight in the face. Flinching, Nicole snapped her head back and pulled the blanket over it.

The _No_ she left for him to figure out.

Hours later, she gave up. Or maybe it was days. Or weeks. How was she supposed to know? Wasn't like she had a clock. A headache though, _that_ she had. A slow, pulsing sort of thing. Like nails being driven through her eye sockets at a steady rhythm. _Thud-thud._ _Thud-thud._

She swung her legs off the bed. They wouldn't stand though. Couldn't be convinced to, and so she just sat there for a bunch more hours, her head hung low over her knees. Alright. Fine. Not hours. Minutes. And not even that many of them, since here he was again, looping the same worn-out question over and over and over again.

"Guardian? Are you—"

"No," she shot back. Half shouted, really, her voice a croaky mess. With the word came the anger. Overwhelming. Unfettered. It boiled up her throat so quick, she didn't stand a chance at choking it back down. Not like yesterday, when she'd reeled it in in time. Furious, Nicole grabbed the pillow — and threw it at him hard as she could.

Didn't matter if she was way off because she wasn't looking. Didn't matter if she hit him or not. She just. had. to. The pillow went and Ghost rolled under it, his shell turning about wildly.

"I'm _not_ okay," she added, fingers clenched into fists and the anger blooming outwards. It pumped from her heart in hard, quick shudders. Replaced her bones with white-hot iron rods. Especially the ones in her arms. It _hurt_. Seared at her.

"Uh. Guardian—"

"_WHAT!_"

"Your, ah… your… ah… fire."

Arm. _Arm!_ Her bloody _arm was burning._

The fire spun around her wrist like a hundred bracelets made of living flame, all twisting and contracting to a rhythm she couldn't make any sense of. Soon, they'd leap up her arm, she figured. Or off of her. Set the whole damn flat on fire. And _then _what?

"_Bollocks._"

Nicole stumbled up from the bed. She dashed across the room, pushed through the curtain into the bathroom, and stuck her arm under the water faucet. The fire went out— a beat before she'd fumbled to get the water on.

Not that she cared. All that mattered was that it was out.

But it hurt. A lot. And for a while Nicole stood there, whimpering, while cold water did its best to wash the burn marks away. Something it failed at spectacularly. By the time she shut the water off, her arm looked like someone had wrapped a rope around it from the wrist up wrist and twisted the rope fierce enough to leave behind angry, red lines.

"Don't cry," she said. "Don't. Cry."

She yanked a towel off a rack and soaked it in cold water to the point where it weighed a ton. It went around her arm in a soggy mess that dripped water everywhere while she pinched her eyes shut. Tightly. A whistle had started building in her ears. Constant. Pitched real high. And it got louder. And louder. It wouldn't stop, no matter how much she willed it to. Still whimpering, and with her heart hammering up her throat, Nicole bailed from the bathroom, the curtain snapping behind her when she'd shoved through.

It was still flapping about when Ghost zipped over to her. His eye fixed on her arm. "You're hurt," he said, absolutely _helpful_. "Let me fix that—"

"Get out," she croaked. Past the whistling in her ear that'd swelled to shrill. Deafening.

"What?"

"You heard me. Get. Out."

"Guardian…"

"_GET OUT!_" Nicole half-shrieked, her voice snapping down the middle and all the _don't cry_ coming together to mean nothing.

Ghost reeled back. And when she swiped at him, almost knocking her towel-wrapped arm into him, he vanished in a puff of muted, blue light.

Gone.

Nicole sucked in air. Every gasp hurt as it went down, making her think she'd _swallowed_ two soaked towels, not just rolled one around her arm. And now she was wringing them out in her chest, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until her gasps turned to choked hiccups.

The tears welling from her eyes maybe didn't burn quite as hot as the fire had, but they burnt anyway. And they wouldn't simply wash off.

* * *

**G**host popped out on the other side of the door, his eye barely an inch from it. There he hung, light falling off him, thin and faint, before its motes danced off into nothing. Much as he would have liked to.

Go up in a puff. Vanish. Forever.

_Dear Traveler,_ he quietly told the door, _My Guardian just kicked me out._

He floated backwards, his shell turning lamely.

_Yes, you heard right. Kicked me out. Not even a day back in the City and I think I'll be nesting with the pigeons next._

He didn't go far, no. Just enough to hover in the middle of the empty hallway. From there, he stared at the door which ought to have been as much of an obstacle as empty air.

But right now? Right now it was as tall and solid as a mountain.

"And I forgot to pack my hiking boots," he muttered. "And my legs."

Instead, he'd brought a core so heavy, he could barely keep himself in the air — all while his Guardian was in there, hurting.

* * *

**W**hen the tears dried, they left her cheeks all sticky and her throat raw. And nothing had changed. She was still alone on the floor, arms tightly wrapped around her knees, while that bleached ball stared at her through a gap in the curtains. Taunting her, probably.

Laughing. Because this was all some colossal joke.

_Nothing _was right. There was no phone in her pocket. No soft, warm dog at her feet. Just her and that ball and two bags left on the floor where she'd dumped them last night.

Oh. And her aching head and wrist.

Wincing, Nicole peeled the damp towel off. The burn marks were still there, of course, 100% real and angry and throbbing like she had bees stuffed under her skin. Great. Worst burn she'd ever had up until now had been from momentarily forgetting oven mittens were a thing. _Now_ she set herself on fire. Without the need for an oven or stove or even just a match.

She sighed and dropped the towel before hauling herself up. That hurt, too. Muscles unacquainted with all the use they'd gotten pulled together into knots. Especially her legs and her shoulders. They ached like she'd grown a hundred years old.

Which was silly.

She'd _died_.

And then she'd skipped those years. The lot of them — and she was still thinking about that. Couldn't stop it. Couldn't pretend it was okay. Couldn't make herself get over it, because how did you get over something like that?

Her eyes flicked to the door. She almost called for Ghost then. _Almost._

At the end, she didn't though. Just sucked her lips in and dug her teeth into them.

How could she be so certain he was out there anyway? That he wasn't right in here with her. Invisible. Hiding. No clue. She just _knew. _Felt it in her gut — or maybe in that ball of heat in her chest — that the flat was empty. Not counting hers truly, obviously.

Jaw clenched, she wobbled over to the shopping bags, swiped them up, and carried them over to the bed to upend them over it. Out tumbled her new clothes.

New clothes for a new life, or some bull like that. All wrinkled up and a far cry from colour coordinated. Wasn't like she'd gone for fashionable. All she'd done was pick the first pieces that'd caught her eye, eager to be out of the shop again. So, now none of it was neat. None of it was perfect.

Not like it'd been perfect before. Her life.

Which was a tangent. She was losing focus. Thinking about things that she shouldn't, because they hurt.

Taking a few deep and shaky breaths, Nicole pinched the bridge of her nose with her un-burnt hand before swiping it all the way down her face to wipe the rest of the tears away.

No, her life hadn't been perfect. Far from it. But it'd been _hers_. Hers to life.

Hers to end. Or so she'd thought.

* * *

**G**host had started pacing. Yes. Ghosts could pace. What about it? Didn't need legs for that. He'd set himself into a steady loop back and forth, ending in a tilt and sway at each corner before he went for another round.

At one point, a door opened. Not _hers_, not his Guardian's, but the one across and a little off to the side. A woman came out, dressed in simple City garb and trailed by a boy no more than five years old. They both regarded him as they went by, the woman with a friendly smile and the kid with his eyes all lit up.

That didn't help one bit. All he could think of was the look on his Guardian's face when she'd screamed at him to get out. The anger in them. The pain. It'd been etched into every line on her face. Plus, the tears. Hard to miss those.

Ghost kept pacing.

So what was he supposed to do? He didn't have forever to get through to her. He had a few _days_. That was all he'd asked for, and here he was, wasting the morning of the first one outside her door.

He stopped in front of it. His shell flared out.

Out here. Rather than in there. With her. Where he was _supposed_ to be. Doing what though? Even if she'd not kicked him out — what was he supposed to do?

_Click._ His shell fell back together. Helping, that was what. Fix her burns. That'd be a good start, right? Right.

Traveler help him, he was _useless._

"Hey, champ."

Ghost's shell practically blew apart as he whirled around, his stabilisers not quite catching and leaving him wobbling unsteadily, all while a mildly amused Shephard looked on with a faint smile.

How'd he done that? How'd he snuck up on him like that? And where was Darrow? Nowhere to be seen, that was where. Ghost squinted.

Between yesterday afternoon and today, Shephard had swapped his armour for a set of black clothes. Sturdy black pants. Black belt. And a black shirt tucked into said belt, all matching his black hair.

Ghost of course only noticed all of that because his _Guardian_ would notice. Not because he paid particularly much attention to how one of the Traveler's favourite dressed. Duh. And he knew exactly what she was going to think.

_Great. This… this is fantastic. She'll be thrilled._ He withered a little.

Shephard caught on, obviously, his smile taking on an inquisitive quality that made Ghost wish he had more control over how his shell acted up lately.

He gestured to the door with one hand, a hand holding on to a paper bag, Ghost observed. Because he, too, could be observant. Thank you. The bag had a stylised, steaming cup printed on it. The words _Daily Revive _were printed under them. He didn't need to scan it to know what was in it.

Breakfast. For his Guardian. _How thoughtful. _

Wait, why was that bugging him?

"She okay?" Shephard asked and took a step forward. To the door. He was going to _go in there_ and it was going to be a _**disaster.**_

"What? Yes. Yes, of course, she's okay," he blurted and, with his processing core reeling uselessly, swung into Shephard's path. Squarely in front of his chest.

A hundred-seventy-something pounds of breakfast carrying Guardian came to a sudden halt, his brows rocking up. "Oh yeah?" He leaned around him. Tried to get past.

"Absolutely." Ghost floated up and to the side, getting all in his way again. "What are you doing here?"

"_I'm_ here to take you two to the Speaker. Remember? Question is, what are you—" He jabbed a finger at him. "—doing out—" Gestured around vaguely. "—here?"

Ghost did a lame lame roll. "Nothing."

"I can see that. So you don't mind if I..." Shephard continued, his words trailing off on purpose probably, and closed the gap some more.

Backed towards the door, Ghost's shell started giving the most uncoordinated roll into every possible direction. "She's, ah, she's showering?" he tried.

Shephard just kept smiling. A small, half tilted and unbelieving smile that grew a little as he reached up to gently push him aside so he could knock on his Guardian's door.

Once. Twice. Three times. Quick knocks that ended in an awkward stretch of silence because no one came to answer.

He'd be lying to himself if he pretended that didn't worry him.

Shephard glanced at him. Ghost tried to shrug. And so Shephard raised his hand again to knock once more. Right as the thing opened — ever so slowly — with his Guardian half tucked behind it, a hand gripping the side tight.

She looked… disheveled. But she'd ditched the oversized clothes for some of what she'd picked out last night; a peach coloured shirt, a pair of jeans, and a linen scarf in different shades of green. The scarf hung on all lopsided and her hair was equally undecided on what way to stick.

But her eyes were what drew his attention. They were puffy. Red at the edges. Had a glassy sort of shine to them and fixed on Shephard with a muted kind of terror.

Ghost hung half paralysed in the air. As if someone had pinned him there. Was he supposed to say something? Tell her he'd found Shephard, maybe? Do something? Anything? Stay where he was? Go invisible? _Dematerialise_? Transmat himself into a waste bin and get taken out with the rest of the garbage?

He did none of that. All he managed was a minuscule tick under his shell, barely enough to glance between his Guardian and Shephard.

Shephard who, as it turned out, still stood there with his hand poised to knock. He lowered it, slowly. Deliberately. Like he knew she'd bolt if he as much as twitched wrong.

"Good morning," he said after a beat of them staring at each other.

"Morning," she mumbled back. The fingers clinging to the door flexed. Her feet shuffled. Was she going to close the door in their faces?

Traveler have mercy, she was, wasn't she?

Shephard though seemed undeterred. With a smile on that was much warmer than the one he'd worn before, he raised the paper bag into her field of vision and gave it a small wiggle.

"I figured you'll want breakfast before we go talk to the Speaker. Buuuut—" He stuck a hand into the bag. When it came back out, it balanced a cup holder with two cups stuck through its holes. "—I didn't know if you're a tea or a coffee animal, so I brought both."

"Coffee." The response was instant.

"Abolishing the stereotype. I like it. Cup on the left."

His Guardian reached for it — but Shephard pulled the whole thing back slightly. She froze as if she'd turned into a rabbit and she'd just seen the shadow of an eagle pass overhead. Or a wolf, in her case.

"_Your_ left," he clarified, the smile still on. And maybe reaching his eyes a little better than it had before. But what did Ghost know? He'd obviously flunked _human reading_.

His Guardian huffed. Then she grabbed the one on _her_ left and slunk back into the apartment. The door she left half-open.

* * *

**T**he three knocks had startled Nicole right out of the absolute nothing she'd been doing. All that sitting there at the small table in a murky dark, the echo of the pitched whistling haunting her, but fading. _Knock-knock-knock_ and she'd almost fallen off the chair and spat up her heart.

Now? Now she had coffee.

Nicole backed into the room, stuck her lips to the cup, and took a sip. Was it maybe a little too hot to reasonably drink? Probably. But she did it anyway, because this? This smelled like coffee. _Tasted_ like coffee. Went down like it, too. It was a moment of borrowed routine, an illusion of having rolled out of bed like a normal person, having put a pot on and maybe not forgotten to get a cup this time around after she'd sat down in front of her keyboard.

It wasn't even very good. It was watery and plain but it got the job done. Least until she noticed how John and Ghost were watching. Quietly. From over by the door as they loitered out in the hall. Her eyes landed on them over the rim of the cup.

She lowered it. Very, very, very slowly.

And all of a sudden she'd grown a rabbit brain. It insisted, thumping and reeling and pulling her stomach into a knot, that she go hide under the bed.

Why? Because John filled out the entire door, decked in black. Shoulder to shoulder. Head to toe. Blocked it all. No way out. Nowhere to go. Between her and the hall stood a black wolf, its green eyes set on a snack.

Naturally, she ought to run. Now. _Right now._ Move.

Run.

_ Run._

** Run.**

John's brow furrowed. The smile he'd come knocking on the door with faded, and his eyes flicked to Ghost. "What happened?" he asked. The question prompted her burn marks to itch fiercely. He'd noticed them. But she didn't dare scratch at them, especially when he stepped into the flat. One long stride. Right in. Nicole remained rooted to the spot, her fingers around the cup tightening.

"Ah," Ghost started, his everything wobbling left and right while he got herded in with a lazy arm gesture. "I made her mad."

John's brow kicked the other way — up, rather than down — and the smile came back. "Look at that. You found yourself a solarflare."

Nicole's cheeks immediately turned awfully red.

Flared. If you will.

_God._ She'd actually thought that. Why'd she thought that?

John, as if he'd read her mind right then and there, looked at her and… ah… winked. It was brief. It was fleeting. And maybe she'd even imagined it.

"Don't worry, there's nothing wrong with you," he said after he'd thoroughly embarrassed her. "It happens to the best of us, no matter if we're a hundred years old or hardly a day."

He gestured between her and Ghost and jutted his chin into her direction. Promptly, Ghost floated over to her, his trajectory keeping him at hip level and his shell drooping.

When he reached her, he wordlessly washed the burns off her skin. Just like that. Here now. Gone then, vanished by a shy bloom of his light. It left a timid tugging sensation behind, even after he'd put his shell back together. A hint that maybe she still carried something under her skin that couldn't decide if it wanted to stay — or fall away and return to him.

Which made absolutely no sense.

But hey. No more swarming bees where the burns had been. No more itching. No more headache, either, though that was the coffee, she figured. And, most importantly, John hadn't shown any indication yet that she was going to be a snack.

Rather, he moved around in the flat like he owned the place, every step purposeful. He dropped the bag off on her table. Pulled the curtains open all the way, the morning light coming in hard enough to burn her eyes. Glanced at the messy piles of clothes on her bed. Glanced at _her_. Drank his tea. And through it all kept his distance.

Slowly, her stomach unknotted.

"So, how do you like the place?"

Aaaand it clenched up again. Stupid. Thing.

Nicole stuck her nose back down over the cup and mumbled a non-committal "It's alright," before distracting herself with another sip of gradually cooling coffee.

"Yeah, guess it is. Bit smaller than I remember. Cozy though."

"This was yours?" Ghost blurted and whirred himself up to hover by her shoulder.

His proximity made her tense up — got every inch facing him to bunch up. Made it all… tingle. Like someone had thrown a shower of sharp pins against her. No amount of rubbing at her neck made the sensation go away. And she tried. She really tried.

"Yep. My second apartment after Darrow raised me. You know, from the dead. Not _raised_ raised." John stopped his round through the place in front of the window, his gaze fixed on the Traveler. "You'll get used to it," he said then. Not to Ghost. To her, she figured.

Whoever this man was in the grand scheme of things, he saw right through her, didn't he? Or maybe having the curtains drawn like she'd had them — turning the flat into a box made of shadows — had given away just how much she didn't want to see it. Because she really didn't want to. See them. The Traveler. Ghost. They both kept shoving this nightmare back into her face.

Nicole looked at the pale ball, unconvinced, and swallowed another gulp of coffee. Her mouth scrunched up. The brew had suddenly gotten a lot more bitter. "If you say so."

"Oh yeah. I do. _Now_—" He'd gone back to the table, scooped up the bag, and carried it into her general direction. "—how about another quick tour around the Tower? See some sights. Chase some pigeons. Meet the Speaker."

He let the bag fall half open and she almost jumped. Almost _squeaked_, really. Had to squash the budding of a noise in her chest before it could grow into something more substantial. Into something embarrassing — because there wasn't anything threatening about him. Not in his slow, deliberate motion. Not in the subtle professionally disarming smile, and not in how he kept himself at least an arm's length away from her at all times. _Her_ arm's length, to be precise.

All so that she could reach her hand into the bag and play go fish for pastries, as it turned out. Which she did. Carefully and half reluctantly. But they smelled nice. Even from that arm's length away. Good enough to convince her stomach to unfurl so it could growl at her.

That traitorous thing.

"Is that a yes?" John asked.

"What? I mean. Yes. That— that sounds good." Nicole's dignity tried to crawl up her throat. She swallowed it back down. With great difficult, mind you.

"Does it?"

_God_.

"No. No, it doesn't." Because it didn't. She didn't want anything to do with any of this. "But I'll come."

For a moment, John simply stared at her. The professional smile he'd worn for the longest time dimmed just a little.

She didn't know what to do with that. With the stare. With the smile. With the anything. So she did the only thing she could reasonably think of at that point: she bit into the piece of unidentifiable pastry. It was flaky. Still a bit warm. Sweet. And reminded her she had no manners.

Swallowing hastily, Nicole added a halfway muffled "Ta."

John's right brow rocked up. "What was that?"

"Thank you," she clarified. "For, ah, the coffee." She raised the hand with the cup in it. "And breakfast." Raised that one, too. "And, ah, the food last night. And the clothes. And—"

_The rescue._

"Don't mention it," he said and indicated the door with a slow sweep of his arm.

Right before she managed to wring that half-life up her throat. Because she didn't mean it. Not really. Not when maybe, just maybe, if he hadn't shown yesterday then that nightmare would have ended right then and there. That, if he hadn't saved her, the choice she'd made would have mattered. A choice she'd had every right to and that no one ought to have taken from her.

But here she was. With guilt burrowed deep in her gut and a life she'd thrown away hell-bent on haunting her.


	16. Not quite one thing

**Not quite one thing. Not quite the other.**

* * *

**N**icole shoved her empty cup into the same dustbin John chucked his tea one in. Him in passing, not even looking, her almost feeding her arm into the damned thing. But hey. This was great. She was finally rid of the thing and she'd only been carrying it around for forever, unable to muster the courage and ask _Where do I put that?_

One obstacle down though. Nice. Cue little party trumpet.

Now all she had to do was follow. Which was fine. She could do that. One step at a time and all that. John wasn't even trying to talk to her and so she kept doggedly to herself while the City unfurled around her.

Sightseeing. Wasn't that what he'd said? She could do that. Sightsee. Eyes up then (or at least somewhat level) and look. Nicole swallowed and ducked her chin into her scarf. The City — the _Last City _— remained odd to look at. Halfway familiar. Halfway not. Decidedly… undecided. Alien and yet not. Old. But not really. There were the beautiful mosaics. The pretty white arches with vines clinging to them. Walls with giant banners on like they were in an old castle. And wind chimes made of polished and tarnished metals alike. Some big. Some small. There were even paper lanterns — and all of that _old _cozies up to concrete and pipes and flashing neon signs right out of a cyberpunk movie (or maybe just Time Square).

The trappings of a world she did not understand.

A busy world. Morning rush sort of busy. Especially along the alley where she'd gotten last evening's ramen, which was stuffed so full of people and not people Nicole wouldn't have ever made it through. Not without John, anyway, who carved a path through the press of colourful bodies while she stayed a step behind. Kind of like riding the wake of a boat, really.

Another obstacle conquered.

Except then the boat stopped. Abruptly. Naturally, Nicole walked right into him.

Nose first. Just straight on squished it flat under a shoulder blade or something. The "Sorry!" she blurted was halfway muffled by his shirt and halfway choked by her heart trying to make it up her throat at the same time.

She stumbled a step back, mortified. Her fingers pumped uselessly. Her neck was a hot mess — and John wasn't bothered a bit. Whyever would he? He threw her a look, quirked a brow at her, and then turned the smile that'd popped onto his lips over to the man he'd stopped for.

They went on to chat, though Nicole was too busy sorting the stupid scarf to really pay attention. Why'd she bought that thing again? Why'd she decided to _wear _it? And had he just called her a _Kinderguardian _again?

Still awkwardly tugging on her scarf, Nicole shifted on her feet and slid behind John, putting him between her and whoever he was wagging his chin at. Best stay out of sight. Out of mind.

But, honestly. What sort of name was that anyway? _Kinder_guardian. Who'd come up with that? And why.

"It's not meant as an insult," Ghost suddenly whispered _rightbyherleftear_. Nicole's nerves pulled taut. So did her scarf. Because she'd yanked on it.

"What?" Wow, that'd come out a wheeze. Brilliant.

"Kinderguardian. It's supposed to be endearing. I— I think it's kind of German? Or at least has German origins."

She side-eyed him. One of his fins hung on a little wrong. Like it couldn't align right any more. Her fingers itched to reach up and fix it.

"Kindergarten," he continued. "That's a place where you send little kids. So, by that logic, you're a Kinder_guardian_. See it?" He rolled for about a quarter of a rotation. "Because you're new to this? And young. Very young. I mean, theoretically."

. . .

"I see," she said, not really seeing at all and with her voice a little drier than she'd intended. "So I'm not a chocolate egg. I'm just a toddler. Got it."

Ghost froze. His eye blinked on and off. "A chocolate egg?"

"Nevermind," she mumbled — and then everything she'd tried so hard to keep together fell apart.

All it took were a few words.

"—see you in the Crucible this week," the stranger John was talking to said." Until then, stay safe, Young Wolf."

Young Wolf.

John's shoulders jumped up in a shrug — and behind him, Nicole's chest filled to the brim with a heavy weight ballooning outwards. It stuck her to the spot and left her no room to breathe.

She'd heard wrong.

Must have. Or misunderstood. That was probably it. No way the man had referred to John there. He'd probably been talking about a literal young canine. Large paws. Satellite dish ears. Those sorts of things. Not _him._

With her heart now properly relocated to her throat, Nicole tried to figure out breathing. Was hard, that. But she managed. Barely. Enough not to have fainted by the time John turned around to look at her.

And look. And look. _And look,_ his way-too-green eyes shadowed by a furrowed brow. Right up until he leaned closer to snap his fingers together in front of her nose.

"I'd ask if you'd seen a ghost, but—" His eyes flicked to her literal Ghost. "—that expression hasn't aged well, has it?"

Ghost, in turn, wheeled in front of her to come up right under her chin. For once, Nicole didn't mind. Not with how he puffed himself up, the gesture convincing John to take a step back.

To give her space. Space in a world that didn't have any for her and she really, really, _really,_ wanted to turn on her heels and head back to her flat. Slam the door. Lock it. And never be seen again. But here she was instead. Hiding behind a whirring, clicking, contraption that fit an attitude way too large for its shell. Hiding from god knew what. A man trying to help who she mistook for the wolf showing up in her feverish nightmares?

"I'm fine," she lied.

John's brow remained furrowed. "Sure you are."

The way his throat bobbed indicated he might have had more to say, but Ghost cut him off before he could get started.

"Where is Darrow anyway?"

John's eyes narrowed at him. Not in an unkind _Why are you interrupting me?_ sort of way, no. If anything, he seemed bemused.

"He's waiting with the Speaker. I thought Nicole might appreciate not having to listen to you two argue. Which, ah, we should probably go." He rubbed his hands together. "You know, before the Speaker loses his patience with him and throws him into the sun?"

"That'd be tragic." Ghost gave a quick roll. A _sarcastic_ roll.

John huffed out a chuckle and jutted his chin the way they'd been headed before he'd been waylaid. Or maybe he was the type that _liked_ talking to everyone. Ew.

Though he didn't march off. Rather, he fixed his eyes on something over her head. Nicole, keenly aware of the world as if it was filled to the brink with fat balloons all waiting to pop, immediately shuffled on her feet to look.

There, right above a round sign with a white chicken painted on it, floated two Ghosts. They ducked behind it when she turned around. Tried to hide. But the sign was too small for the both of them, leaving the tips of their fins to poke out awkwardly.

She stared at them. Well, in reality she stared at the sign. Was that chicken wearing a _hat_? A baseball cap? Who put baseball caps on chickens and—

John took ahold of her elbow.

Gently, really. Light as a feather's touch. But _POP_ went a theoretical balloon anyway and left her nerves jittery and on fire. She went rigid on the spot. The scarf she wore? Suddenly felt like it pulled close and choked her.

John hummed up a curious "Hmm." A very weighty _hmmm,_ like he'd just had an incredibly important thought.

"So, Nicole, I have a question," he started and got her walking. "Do you know what a Speaker is?"

She pulled her elbow back and shook her head.

"He good as runs the City," Ghost said. He'd glued himself to her left shoulder, keeping pace. Keeping close. "Or, rather, he heads the Consensus. That's like a council, made up of the City's largest factions. The Vanguard. New Monarchy. Dead Orbit," he went, each item on the list coming with a slight lean left or right. "The Future War Cult…"

"The what?" Nicole's brow bunched up.

"I… ah…" Ghost glanced at her. Then at John. John, who showed patience with him that Nicole couldn't think to even dream of. Not like she wanted to dream. At all. Ever again.

"Sorry." His shell wiggled a tad. Barely enough to be worth the mention — like the small and quiet smile John carried. "I interrupted you. That's rude. I'm rude."

"You're excitable. But, yeah. Politics, there's that. Not what I was going for though. What I meant was: What makes the Speaker a _Speaker._"

She shrugged. "He speaks for the City council thing? The Consensus?"

"Nope. He speaks for the Traveler."

"The big ball _speaks_?"

John inhaled slowly, then gave a curt, non-committal shrug. "Not through conventional conversation, no. Far as I know, they are dreams, mostly. Waking dreams. Visions. Mirages. Thoughts. Ideas. They've come to Speakers ever since the Traveler arrived. Or so the stories go, anyway. The Speaker you're going to talk to today just so happens to be the only one we have right now. Far as we're aware, anyway."

He paused just long enough to lift his arm around her and press his hand against her shoulder. The touch felt like the sun took a bite out of her shoulder and served to direct her in front of him. Right in time, too. She'd almost walked into a woman decked out in bulky armour dyed in orange and blue. A Guardian, she figured. And one so tall, Nicole felt sorry for how much that'd had to hurt when she'd sprouted as a teen.

Except she'd not remember.

The thought locked up her brain. None of these Guardians remembered being children, did they? No memories of growing up. No growing pains, no lessons about not breaking your bones, no crying over nothing. Wasn't all that and more how you learned to be _people_?

To be you?

She was so fixed on that train of thought, her legs couldn't decide if they ought to go left or right to sort herself in next to John again, ending in an awkward shuffle either-or-way. And a few mortifying collisions when he tried to navigate around her.

Nicole tugged her scarf up to her chin and fervently hoped the heat rushing up her neck didn't hit her cheeks.

"Anyway," John said with a wobbly, sheepish grin. "Not only does the Traveler send the Speakers dreams, but its Ghosts? They adore them. A lot. Like, flocking to them kind of adoring."

"Oh. I see," she mumbled into the scarf while trying to keep John in her field of vision. That maybe she ought to be looking where she was walking only occurred to her once. Briefly.

His brow went up. "You do, huh?"

Nicole blinked lamely. She was missing something, wasn't she?

Ghost swung in front of them. "What? No," he blurted. His eye fixed on John. "No way. I'd _know._"

"Hey, I'm just saying," John said with a shrug, his palms bared in a placating gesture.

_Know what?_

Her head spun.

Ghost's shell gave a red-tipped ruffle. He harrumphed. And Nicole? Nicole remained utterly confused.

A constant that stuck around until they reached the Tower. Not like she'd have noticed if Ghost hadn't told her as much. And gosh was it busy, though John didn't stop where all the noise was but took them to a corner filled to the brim with an odd hush. There were stairs to her right. A ring of them. Leading up. John ignored them. He stuck to the walkway following at the edge of the shelf (that was what she'd call all those godforsaken buildings hanging off the wall from now on), with a railing stuck along the curved edge. Halfway to the other side stood a bridge.

A bit like the one from last night. Except much shorter and connecting to a structure that rose like a pillar-ringed island from the depths — rather than an impossibly tall skyscraper.

But a bridge was a bridge was a bridge, and Nicole's feet stopped walking. John kept going. For a bit, anyway.

He stopped a few steps in and threw her a look — right as his Ghost swung around him, his round shell puffed out.

"_Finally,_" Darrow said, perfectly exasperated. "What took you so long?"

"Aw. Missed me?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I was getting bored, that's all." Concluding his circling of John, Darrow stopped and looked at her. "Is she coming or what?"

Nicole, her mouth dry, couldn't quite get the words out, but it turned out she didn't have to.

"She's not okay with heights," Ghost said for her and shimmied on ahead of her.

"Oh, if you weren't so dense you knew just how far from _okay_ she is. Generally. On a molecular leve—"

"Darrow."

Darrow went quiet and John folded his arms. Didn't come back to fetch her. Just stood there. Watching.

Her Ghost gave his shell a spin. "You've got this, Guardian. Remember the bridge last night?" He sounded almost cheerful when he said that. In a careful sort of way. "That was a lot longer. This one's just a few steps."

"Right." She managed a step.

"Right," he echoed.

And, somehow, she caught up with John, who flashed her an encouraging smile before leading her into a wide-open hall that missed an entire wall at the back, granting her a perfect view of the Traveler perched above the City.

Vertigo nibbled on her heart.

Dominating the centre of the hall was a massive contraption built around what looked like a round, pale blue hologram of… something. Everything was _off. _For the first time since she'd left the hangar full of what looked like _spaceships, _Nicole felt surrounded by Tomorrow. Large capital T. Nothing in here was familiar. It was all sci-fi and moving parts — with a shine and charm to it that came with gold trimmings and a red carpet of all things. The carpet swung around the entire place. On it stood consoles that all held more of those round holograms.

The carpet did well at muffling her's and John's footsteps.

"Those are scans of the solar system," Ghost whispered when they passed the leftmost hologram one. Nicole accepted that and tried not to think too much about it.

And then they went up. Of course they did. Why not? Sighing, she followed John up a wide staircase tucked into a corner, which swung up in a generous arch and led to a platform looking out over the hall with all its contraptions.

Up there stood two people; a man and a woman locked in a conversation she couldn't quite make out.

"That's the Speaker," Ghost whispered by her ear and nodded his entire body into the direction of the man.

From the angular fit of his chest piece and the wide robes around his legs, the Speaker if the scenery almost perfectly. He was clad mostly in white, safe for wide, grey shoulder pads that fanned out like stumpy, clipped wings, and a black hood coming together under his chin in a v-shaped scarf. And he wore a mask. A white mask with slits in them that made Nicole wonder how on Earth he could comfortably see out of it. Then again maybe he didn't. Maybe you didn't need eyes any more in the future.

"And that's _Ikora Rey,_" Ghost added after a moment, his voice pitching with enough excitement to give her second-hand shakes. "She's the Warlock Vanguard."

Ikora (odd name) stood a breath taller than the Speaker. Straight-backed and slender, she had rich, dark brown skin, and hair cropped short enough it might as well have been shaved.

She wore long robes in shades of purple, reinforced with leather that cupped her shoulders and flared out around her neck to form a wide, stiff collar. A tall, red sash hugged her waist, kept in place by leather belts — but what drew Nicole's eye was a pale, purple _something_ wrapped around the woman's left upper arm. It looked like a butterfly with slim, rectangular wings. Except it was made of light. Another hologram, probably.

In the hand attached to that arm, the woman held a Ghost.

Or what was left of one, anyway.

"This isn't about whether or not it will alarm people," she told the Speaker, holding the Ghost up in front of him. "By all means, it _should_ alarm them. We need for our Guardians to be mindful. To know _this_ — whatever _this_ is — is in here. Killing them."

The Ghost's shell might have been green once. Now it was mostly blackened. As if it'd turned to ash and frozen like that.

"In here. Not out there," she continued. "Not in battle. But within the walls, where they should be _safe._" She put the Ghost down gently, setting it onto an already cluttered table. There were papers. Books. _Actual _books. Leather bound ones. And pens and tools and all sorts of things. "This is the sixth one dead, so tell me how many more you need before you think it warrants alarming them? Eight? Ten?"

Her tone was steady. Maybe a little too steady, with a taut line drawn through it that weighed it all down with a distinct gravity. Nicole felt the whole thing in her bones and would have liked to turn around. Even Ghost slowed. He'd inched close enough to almost touch her ear, his shell uncharacteristically stiff.

But John's arm got in the way, landing her in the crook of his elbow before she could stop. When she looked, she just about caught the tail end of a grim frown before he dispelled it with a small smile.

"Don't worry. She doesn't bite," he whispered.

Trapping her tongue between her teeth, Nicole marched on. His arm fell away.

When they'd almost made it to the top, Ikora's up to this point very straight and tall shoulders sagged a little. She let out a long breath as if to collect herself, and then drew her shoulders back up.

Then she turned to look at them. At John and Darrow and Ghost and her. They both did, though the Speaker remained perfectly quiet.

Nicole thought that should have been the other way around. Because Speakers ought to speak and whatnot, but he really wasn't doing any of that. Just stood there with his bizarre mask on, which probably should have frightened her more than it did. But it didn't. She was too busy feeling insignificant in front of a woman she'd never met before and knew nothing about.

God, she was a mess.

"John," the Ikora said. Her voice had lost most of that weight. Had fallen to something warm. A soft smile pulled at her lips. Enough of one to make Nicole's chest stop trying to strangle her. Which she'd not even noticed it'd been having a go at.

John, in turn, inclined his head and returned the smile with something a lot more toothy. "Ikora."

Her eyes flicked over to Nicole. "And who is this colourful Guardian?"

Whoops. There came the heat again, rushing up to her neck at the drop of a thought. Because suddenly Nicole remembered what a disaster her wardrobe was.

John gave her a sideways glance. "This is Nicole. She's a bit shy."

_Not helping._

Nicole's cheeks practically caught fire.

"Come on. Say hi."

"Hi…"

_I hate my life._

"Aaaand I think she's one of yours," he added after she'd embarrassed herself for the umpteenth time.

At that, Ikora's slender brows ticked up a notch. She also glanced her up and down, like she was sizing her up. Not as much judging as sating a curiosity. "A warlock, hm?"

"Something like it," the Speaker said, his voice surprisingly soft and not at all as tinny as she had expected. What with the mask and all. He was also clearly staring at her, which got her neck itching something fierce.

Nicole tried not to let it show. She shoved her hands into her pockets.

"She is the Guardian I told you about earlier, the one John found yesterday," the Speaker said.

"_Hey,_" Ghost complained under a breath he didn't have.

"Darrow, if you please." He gestured to Darrow, who zipped through the air in a blur of purple before projecting a sheet of busy light in front of him. Wibbly-wobbly lines moved across it, sometimes flashing red or green, and neither them nor the numbers running by made any sense to her at all. Ikora seemed interested though. Good for her?

There was pointing. There were words. Big ones. Though Nicole mostly tuned out, at least until the shoe dropped. Which it always did, didn't it.

"I'm inclined to think this Ghost managed to raise a Speaker," the, ah, _Speaker _concluded.

Nicole, for one, didn't know what to do with being told that. She stood there dumbly as before and shifted on her feet. Hearing that didn't make her feel any better. Or any worse.

It just rung awfully hollow to her. An empty promise ultimately unfulfilled.

But it clearly meant _something_. Not to her, no. But to everyone else, because she was the only one untouched by those words.

Ikora managed to stand even straighter, somehow, and folded her arms with a sudden, quiet, "Hm."

And Ghost? He jerked away with a wild whirr of his shell, his voice-box popping out a stutter of "I— I— I— I— did _what?_"

"A Speaker, buddy," John echoed, a cheerfully coy look on his face. "Told ya."


	17. Help Wanted

**Help Wanted**

* * *

"**Y**ou remember then. Your first life. Earth before the Traveler, before the Golden Age. You remember all of it."

Ikora set the words down on the ancient coffee table between them. Not as a question that pressed to be answered, but as something of great importance in need of acknowledgement by the one person who hadn't yet weighed in on the subject: The one who lived it.

Nicole nodded.

She sat half-hunched over the table, idly tracing a finger over the rough grain of age-old wood, and tried very hard not to, well, dwell. On anything.

It was quiet in here. Which was nice. Quiet and private. And now that she'd had a while to sit stewing in her own silence on some old leather cushions (that seemed adamant to try and swallow her) and the buzz of the Tower and City alike had stayed outside the door, she felt like maybe — just maybe — she'd find some words. Something to contribute past shrugs and nods and a deep-seated desire not to be here.

Not that _here_ was bad. Not in the grand scheme of things. Here was alright. Better than back at the Speaker's… whatever that'd been. His lab? His office? Observatory?

For observing_._

Nicole leaned her head to the side a little, her thoughts wandering off. She didn't even know who she ought to be thanking for the change of scenery. Who'd noticed how something-something-light-frequencies meant a whole lot of nothing to her.

That… Guardians? Speakers? It didn't matter what you called them, they were all the same to her: impossible and absurd.

So while Ghost and Darrow had bickered and the Speaker had stood with Ikora over a large datapad looking thing exchange words that went right over her head, Nicole had felt lost at sea with no shoreline in sight. Ever outwards she'd drifted. And drifted. And drifted. Any questions levelled at her she'd answered with a blank stare and a shrug — still drifting. And drifting.

John had been the only one not engaged in picking at the seams of her story. He'd stood off to the side with his shoulder against a wall. His expression had been unreadable, offering up nothing.

But then a bunch of Guardians had shown up at the bottom of the stairs, their chins wagging something fierce. Six of them. All sorts of shapes and sizes and all decked out in weapons and armour. It'd been a sight.

They'd begun climbing the steps — and Nicole had gotten ready to do some climbing of her own. Up the nearest wall, preferably. The _entire_ Wall if she'd had to. The real big one.

Which had been when someone had decided she didn't need to be here. All of a sudden she'd been walking down the stairs, the small crowd of Guardians parting around John and Ikora like a school of small fish avoiding sharks while she'd shuffled along behind them. The Speaker they'd left behind to receive his audience and her they'd taken back on another wander through the City.

Ghost and Darrow had kept arguing on and off. A snipe here, a jab there, their inside voices forgotten. John and Ikora though? No arguing. No loud words. They'd talked in soft, kind voices, exchanging even kinder words of which she only caught snatches off here and there. Friends then, she figured. Talking about nothing and everything at once while they had an odd duck glued to their heels.

_Quack._

Once they'd reached their destination — a small, narrow coffee shop with an old, rusty sign above the door reading _Daily Revive_ — John had propped the door open for them and then left them to find somewhere to sit while he'd gone to fetch drinks.

So. Yeah. That'd been her since then. Sitting on that sofa, trying to find words which she ought to have while Ikora looked at her. She'd obviously hadn't had any luck. With the words, that is. Sighing, Nicole leaned back and shoved her hands between her thighs.

All she'd had luck with was making this more awkward. Like an interview from hell for a job she neither wanted nor needed. Let alone knew the acceptable interview answers for.

Was Ikora going to ask her how well she coped with stress?

Was John going to join her over there and ask if she was a team player?

Awkward.

Ghost wasn't being much help either. He hovered off by her shoulder, his eye swinging back and forth between her and the walls. Walls lined with shelves all weighed down by old, broken things.

No. That detail hadn't escaped her. She'd noticed right when walking through the door. This place? Full of things from an age gone by and then some.

_Guess whose._

Yeah. Her's.

"It makes sense," Ikora said, reeling her thoughts back before they got sucked into comparing herself to that traffic light hung by the door with one of its bulbs missing.

"What does?" John appeared from her left, Darrow close behind. He came equipped not only with the question she ought to have asked but also with a loaded tray. It was full of steaming mugs, a pitcher of water, some empty glasses, and spoons and sugar cubes stacked on a tiny plate. He set the tray down before handing Ikora one of the mugs.

Because apparently Nicole was terrified of a gentleman. The sort that held open doors, gave away dinner and breakfast and borrowed you his clothes when yours were soaked/scorched/torn/fucked.

_Figures._

"That she can't use her Light like other Guardians after they've been raised," Ikora said, trading the answer for the mug. "Thank you, John."

"Mhm," John hummed back.

Nicole squeezed her knees together. She glanced between them. John was giving her a thoughtful look, though not because of what Ikora had said, she wagered. He was trying to decide where to sit. His eyes went back and forth between the empty seat next to Ikora and the spot next to her. Eventually, he decided to sink into the sofa on her side. The cushions under her immediately tilted and Nicole struggled to sit somewhat straight. If sitting straight included hunched shoulders and a morose little curl with her hands still stuck between her thighs and her elbows jammed into her sides.

And that's how she sat there while John put one of the mugs in front of her and then proceeded to dump sugar cube after sugar cube into the last one.

One.

Two.

Three.

Nicole blinked lamely, all thought of Light and such forgotten, because _Dear God._

He added a fourth one. A _fourth_ one. Plop the cube went, sinking into a black over-sugared abyss while a small spoon clinked about valiantly. And clink-clink-clink it kept on going as John stirred while he leaned back into the puffy cushions. He swung his legs up on the table, one booted foot stacked over the other.

"She can though," Ghost protested. Like that mattered. At all. "You can," he added, shimmying into her field of vision. "You did. More than once."

Nicole shrugged. She really, _really_ didn't care.

"But not on purpose," Ikora said. "She has no way of knowing how to." Her eyes fixed squarely on Nicole — and it didn't take a second for her to feel like a blob of slime mould stuck under a microscope. Though then Ikora glanced at John, who promptly cleared his throat and moved his boots off the table. He gave a small rueful smile, half-hidden behind his coffee flavoured sugar, and Nicole thought that maybe Ikora had that effect on everyone.

The slime mould bit.

"When we're raised," she continued, "we wake with a set of instructions that let us understand what our Light can do. What we can channel it into. And while we won't master it without extensive training, at least we're given a blueprint to follow. Something to build on. It's how a Warlock knows their dawnblade. A Titan their shield. A Hunter their golden gun."

She paused long enough to take a sip from her drink. Tea. Golden and rich looking, though no telling what sort. But no bells and no whistles added from what she could see. Certainly no sugar.

"You weren't given that. When you were brought back, there was no room for instructions. You weren't a half-empty cup your Ghost could fill. But, regardless of that, your Light tries to manifest. Tries to be what you _need_ it to be. Not what you know it _can_ be."

"That's why you blinked across the shipwreck when you wanted to get away," Ghost said. He swung his eye to Ikora. "Right?"

"Void-walked. But, yes. I'd think so."

Ghost looked back at Nicole, his shell carried away by all the excitement that kept coming and going. "Then, when you got surrounded, you made a bubble." He swung his eye to John. Then to Ikora. "That makes sense, yeah?"

"Mhm," John added. "And when you got on her nerves she almost torched you."

Nicole blushed. Again. God, she hated it.

Ghost sunk lower and huffed.

"Turning to Solar fire in moments of heightened emotional turmoil is common enough." Ikora shrugged a regal sorts of shrug. Regal. Yeah. That was a good word for the whole of her. "And how you favour Void Light for protection may mean it's what comes to you with more ease than Solar. Or Arc, for that matter."

"Arc," Nicole repeated.

Ikora's exchanged a look with John, who lazily lifted a hand to point a finger at Ghost.

In return, Ghost's shell squeezed together. "Hey, why _me_? Why not Darrow?"

"Because you're her little trooper, that's why."

"I'm— I'm not a _little_ anything."

_Zap._

A thin, near-invisible, white-blue spark jumped from John's finger. It arced through the air with a muted crackle and connected with Ghost's nearest fin so quickly, Nicole barely had time to jolt on the spot.

Her skin tightened. Like she'd cosied up to a power line, its current running at odds with her blood. A sensation that came and went as quickly as the spark.

Ghost shook himself out like a dog might after its fur had got wet, but he didn't seem overly bothered. If anything, the look he threw her after he'd sorted himself back together had _Ta-da!_ written all over it.

Did anything dampen that little guy's spirits for long?

"Arc Light," he said. Cheerfully.

"I see." Literally. To be fair, she'd have probably not believed it if all they'd done was told her. No matter the things she'd already witnessed. "So it's like— electricity."

"Electromagnetism." Ghost's shell ticked. "Uh. Sort of."

"And Solar, that's, what, fire?"

He hesitated.

"Think hotter," John put in.

"Right. Solar. Sunnish. Like, fusion hot?"

"Ding ding ding." John's lips quirked up into a grin.

Nearby, Ghost whispered: "Sort of."

Her hand inched to her chest where it gave her shirt a soft tug. It was hard not to be reminded of the tight ball of heat under her heart. The one she'd woken to when Ghost had pulled her from her grave. The one that'd tugged and tugged and tugged relentlessly all the way to the City. To the Traveler. Now it lay dormant.

Sort of.

"And what's Void Light?"

"Complicated," Ikora said before anyone else could put an answer forward. "Like I imagine all of this—" She spread her arms a little, indicating… well… everything. "—is for you right now. And no one will fault you for not wanting to be a part of it."

_No kidding._

"But you are," she continued.

Nicole slipped her tongue between her teeth.

"And you've been given something that, once word gets out, will have a lot of people asking questions."

"What? Like, my remembering things?"

"That too," John said over the rim of his mug, implying that wasn't quite it.

"The Speaker thing?"

John's head did a little left and right wobble. "That _too._"

"Your connection to the Traveler," Ikora finally said. "Your Light. This—" She gestured to Ghost. "Replay the ketch recording."

Ghost zipped closer to the table. And printed a picture in thin air, one made of strands of pale holographic light that showed… grass? Why was he showing them grass? A perfect circle of it, no less. Thick and stubby and surrounded by gnarly ground covered in thin, tall weeds.

"What's that?" Nicole asked. Because honestly? She had no idea what she was looking at.

"You," Ikora said at length and making absolutely no sense.

The picture zoomed in and pulled the circle into focus. At its centre stood a dozen or so flowers. Tiny ones. White ones. Daisies, probably.

"Your Light did this when you fled the ketch crash site. Or, rather, the _Traveler's_ Light did. Not a Guardian's."

"There's a difference?" she asked, not looking up from the hologram. Which, admittedly, was pretty neat. Still staring, Nicole mouthed _Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, _a tickle of amusement blooming briefly. Ghost's shell gave a little twitch.

"There is," Ikora continued. "A Guardian's Light is a weapon, one given to us so we can defend what's left of humanity. And defend the Traveler if we must. But the Traveler's Light? That's life. Creation. Not destruction. It made barren planets habitable for us. Brought them water. Plants. An ecosystem. It rushed aeons of evolution so we could strike out and colonise beyond the moon. And that, my young Guardian, is the Light clings to you more so than it does to any of us."

Nicole stopped staring at the hologram only to look dumbly between Ikora and John.

"Right. So. What does that _mean_? Because I'm not following."

Ikora leaned back. "I don't know. Maybe it's a byproduct of a light-bearing Speaker. If that's even what you are. For all we know, your connection to the Traveler is incidental and not the point of all of this. Whatever this is."

"Great. That… that's helpful. Really." Nicole clenched her jaw.

"I know this is frustrating."

"No. I don't think you do." Aaaaand that'd come out harsher than she'd wanted it to. So she added a hurried "Sorry," at the end and went back to shoving her hands between her thighs.

"No, you're correct. I don't. But if you'll let me, I'll help you find whatever path you've been sent on. Or at the least teach you how not to set your Ghost on fire."

Said Ghost's shell perked up and his eye widened to form an almost perfect circle. Like a child that'd just heard they were going to Disney World — and somehow Nicole doubted it had anything to do with not being set on fire. And everything with who'd made the offer.

"What if I don't want to?"

Ghost promptly deflated. The hologram he'd been holding up winked out. "Guar—"

Ikora held up a finger. His voicebox fell silent.

"No one will _make _you. This is your choice." She leaned forward, folding her hands in front of her and looking up to Nicole. Like an adult coming down to a child's height. "But those visions you've had? They're given to you by the Traveler. The _Traveler. _I don't know how much your Ghost told you already about it. How it... gave itself up to create them. We thought it died then. That all that's left of it are its Ghosts. And us."

A shiver snuck down Nicole's spine. She recalled how she'd felt staring at it from her window in her flat. Like standing at a stranger's grave, the one she ought to remember in life and didn't know had ever died.

"Yet here you are. Right in front of me. Maybe you're a Guardian raised just a little closer to the Traveler, or a Speaker gifted with its Light. Whichever it is — and whatever you choose to do with it — it won't change that you've been given something extraordinary."

"I didn't _want _anything extraordinary. I didn't _want—_" Nicole gestured lamely. "—death visions while _dead._ They freak me out." An understatement, that. "It's not... I don't... it's not even like they make sense. Nothing does."

Ikora's brow furrowed. "They don't follow you when you're awake," she half asked, half guessed.

Nicole shook her head.

"No waking visions at all?"

Another slight shake of her head.

"What about… dreams?"

"Nightmares," Nicole admitted. Her eyes flicked to Ghost — and looked right through him to stare at John long enough for anxiety to well from her chest again. "Really arse nightmares, but just nightmares," she added quickly.

She wasn't about to start raving about wolves. She'd look like a loony.

Ikora sat back, a quiet "Hm," trailing her.

"What did you do back when?" John asked when no one else offered to fill the silence.

The question caught her off guard. Nicole stared at her hands for a moment, the ones still buried between her thighs. "Stuff," she said.

"Exciting. What sort of stuff?"

"Technical writing, I guess?" She pulled her hands out and wrung them on her knees instead. Was that what he'd meant? Work? She glanced up and found him watching her with a _go on _sort of look. So she got on. "I was rubbish at it though? Fair though, because I was generally rubbish at doing the whole work thing. Tried a lot of jobs but nothing ever stuck." Least that was one way to go about not saying how it was hard to hold on to work when you got anxiety eating you from the heels up every day. She tried not to think of that and reached for her mug of coffee to lift it under her chin. "Even did a wee bit of barista work once. Suppose I wasn't all bad at that."

"Aha," John went and suddenly he was up and headed for the counter.

"What are you doing—" Darrow piped behind him, zipping along.

Nicole took a deep breath and tried her hardest to generally unclench. Though the moment she did that, her right knee started bouncing. That awful, cursed thing. She set a hand down on it and grimaced.

"My offer stands, regardless," Ikora said. If Nicole's lukewarm reaction to that_ extraordinary _gift had disappointed her, she didn't let it show. "And if only to give you a little certainty by teaching you what you weren't given. A little reassurance."

And while Nicole mustered up the courage for a nod, John made it back to the sofa and dropped himself into it with a content sigh. Then he flipped a piece of paper down on the table in front of her, twisted it with a flick of his wrist, and slid it under her nose.

_**Help Wanted, **_it read.

Funny, that.

It was exactly what she thought she ought to be wearing on her forehead.


	18. Help Needed

TW: Suicide. Panic Attack.

I swear it gets better.

* * *

**Help _Needed_**

* * *

**S**he knows she's dreaming. Or at least she's not awake, but lodged in-between, where thought and sensation make for the oddest of bedfellows, trading in hopes and dreams and an inexhaustible supply of realities.

This one is another yesterday.

She knows which one.

It's a dreary April. In 2019. She's fled work early and now she sits in her car, her hands locked around the steering wheel while the news anchor on the radio prattles about Mars. About a Tomorrow made of Sacrifice.

She'd turn the radio off if she could. Except she can't take her hands off the wheel. There's a choice coming, after all. She has to make the right one. Can't blink or she'd miss it.

So she doesn't blink. Every detail around her stands out. From the fine scratches in the leather of the wheel to the chip in the windshield and the dust on the console. Dust she ought to clean but never does. She forgets.

Her eyes flick up. A Wunderbum dangles from her rearview mirror. It's a sun-faded black with a splash of pink, its scent faint because replacing it is another thing she forgets. She's good at that. At forgetting.

_Wild Child_, the bottom of the little tree reads.

Nicole hasn't ever been particularly wild.

The Wunderbaum moves. It doesn't spin lazily like it usually does. Instead, it lifts, as if someone pinched it by the trunk and is pulling it back, stretching the thin rubber cord until it forms a straight line from the front of the car pointing at the boot.

Gravity shifts. Her gut lurches.

When she looks up, a dark river rushes up at her, its waters churning.

She screams. The car impacts.

The steering wheel strikes her like a mallet, breaking her apart around it. She dies, but it isn't quick. She dies— but it doesn't stick. Heat snatches at her heart. It pulls her back together, sorts her pieces into place. Some on right. Some on wrong.

The car lurches backwards. Out of the water. Up onto the bridge. It rightens itself, screeching the wrong way around until she sees the car in front of her flashing its brake lights all angry and red and _**STOP.**_

Here's her choice.

She doesn't stop. She never does.

The steering wheel presses down hard on her chest. A weight worth a hundred worlds. It wrenches left. The traffic barrier between her and the drop going down the bridge sits there. Waiting. It knows she'll barrel through it.

She ought to brake. But she never tries to. Never wants to.

Her foot slams the gas pedal.

Over and over again, Nicole goes over the edge. She hits the water. A clap of agony snuffs out her world, only for hot talons to come digging into her and tear her back up. Over. And over. Again. Seconds tick backwards, put her on the road where the red light flashes.

She makes the same choice each and every time. And above her, ever watchful, sits the Traveler, its bleached bones bleeding blackened moths made of soot.

* * *

_**D**__ear Traveler,_ Ghost recorded quietly as he sat upon his shelf, the apartment filled top to bottom with nothing but a hush and a lot of darkness. No matter how much a thin sliver of light tried changing that, peeking around the edge of the curtains like a shy guest.

Yeah, so he should have been resting.

But how did you rest after a day like that? A day where you found out your Guardian had risen differently. So different, not even Ikora Rey or the Speaker knew exactly where to start sticking the right labels. Maybe _Ophichus _would have had an opinion about it if he'd bothered to show himself, rather than staying out of everyone's collective hair (or lack thereof).

_It's 04:21 and I think I've decided that sorting pre-Golden Age music alphabetically was a terrible idea. So I'll be sorting it by genre again._

_Or maybe by artist? Hm. What do _you_ think?_

His eye flashed briefly, adding a tinge of blue to the room. He shuttered it again a moment later.

_Oh. Right. I forgot. You don't talk to me. Ever. Like how you didn't tell me that _'Hey, Ghost of mine, I gave you a Speaker-Guardian. She'll be in need of extra attention — so here are some detailed instructions on how **not** to make a complete fool out of yourself when you get started with her.'

His circuits charged with what came together as an inward-turned bristle, and his background processes stalled, freezing up towards the tail-half of the letter B. Something with a Breaking Benjamin.

Frustrated, he started over. Not that he had to, strictly speaking, but he was desperate for something to help occupy his mind.

It wasn't working very well.

Much like sleep wasn't working well for his Guardian.

Fitful as the nights prior, her sleep was punctuation by small, miserably noises. Sometimes he wondered if he should float his purely speculative butt over there and wake her. But she'd had a long day. A very long day spent mostly wandering the streets aimlessly after they'd left the coffee shop.

Wandering and not talking.

He squirmed and flashes his eye on again, dimming its glow as to not bother her by accident as he looked at her from all the way over here.

_Dear Traveler,_ he continued.

_How can someone be so quiet? You'd think she'd have a lot of questions after all of this, but all she did this afternoon was get lost and wear out that piece of paper Shephard gave her._

Ghost lifted off the shelf, his shell clicking together lamely. His still very broken shell, he reminded himself, keenly aware of how the tape holding one of his tips on had started peeling at the edges. Maybe he should ask for a new one?

His eye flicked to the kitchen table, to the paper sitting on it. She'd folded it and unfolded so often, the letters had become hard to read. But it'd been all she'd been doing, really. As if the words printed on it had her under some sort of spell.

_She wasn't looking at _anything_ else. At all. Like the City wasn't even there. Like _I_ wasn't even there. I mean, she walked into four people. Four! I counted. How do you not start looking where you're going after the first one. How? And all the while it's like she forgot how words work._

He floated to the curtains and nudged at them, peeking outside. Out there, the City teemed with stubborn life. A show of brilliant, dancing lights with the Traveler looking on above it. All stoic and, ah, quiet.

_Nevermind. Something, something apples and trees, right?_

He'd have probably hovered there for a while longer, staring out at nothing in particular and lending half a mind to sorting his music collection, when his Guardian let out a stifled cry.

Ghost wiggled back. The curtains fell shut.

She squirmed under her blanket, her feet kicking and her head tossing left and right while her eyes remained tightly shut. Nightmares. Real bad ones, too. Bad enough to throw her vitals up the wall and send an invisible ripple of confused Void Light through the room.

A shake later, that same light manifested in thin, ashen-purple tendrils bleeding out from under the blankets.

Ghost hung there, frozen. "Guardian?"

She kicked again. Her lower back arched. Her arms twitched violently, and the Void Light sung a deep-seated, mournful tune.

He inched forward. "Guardian, you're, ah. You're having a nightmare." He looked around the room. Then back at her. The light show began to worry him. Mostly because his scans couldn't make much sense out of it, but something told him that the way it collected so densely was probably bad. "I think you should wake up?"

Traveler help him, what was he supposed to _do?_

* * *

_**G**__uardian,_ a voice calls. A glitch. It doesn't belong. Not in here. Not with her. But it's maddening and familiar and cracks her world in half.

* * *

**T**urned out that he should have woken her from a little farther away. Not with one of his fins almost touching her cheek when she hadn't heard him the first few times.

He managed one last quiet "Guardian—" before the Void Light building in her core erupted in a wave so tight, it knocked him into the nearest wall.

A searing, bright burst of Light followed. Tore right through him. And snuffed him out like he was no more than a sad little flame on a sad little candle.

* * *

**V**ertigo yanked at her when Nicole woke. Disorientated, and with her heart hammering against the base of her throat, she struggled to breathe and to think and to generally _be_. Every sensation was too much. Every pull of air too hard. Even her shirt tried to suffocate her, clinging on way too tight. She pulled on it, wanting room, and found it practically soaked.

Gross.

Then came the oesophagal spasms — those bloody things she'd thought'd kill her when she'd had them the first time, convinced she was going to have a heart attack. But, nah. No heart attack. Just a panic attack offloading itself into her chest, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing as if someone'd stuffed a hand down there. Some things never changed.

Nicole knew better than to fight them lying down.

She slid out from under the covers, planted her legs on the ground, and at sat the bed's edge as straight as she could. And that was how she remained for a while, drawing in shallow breath after shallow breath. Waiting. Hoping it'd pass. Which it would. Eventually.

Her jaw clenched so tight her teeth groaned. Or would it? She locked her eyes on the empty room in front of her, vividly and terribly missing the pad of claws on the floor and the face-full of fur that came after, along with Thor's familiar and comforting weight. He'd been a horrible guard dog. But great at warding her from herself. A whimper crawled up her throat and she squeezed her eyes shut.

No Thor. Thor was dead. Probably died in a _shelter, _alone and terrified, because at the end she'd left him behind.

Like a coward.

She'd been a coward.

Nicole opened her eyes. With trembling lips and tears blurring her vision, she focused on the sharp pain instead. On how it came and went and came and went, not making any show to ease up anytime soon. When her tears dried, she looked at her flat. Her creepy, _creepy _flat with a sheen of light filling half of it.

That gave her pause. The light did, anyway. Nicole frowned. She could have sworn she'd closed the curtains. Had done so a pointed yank, too. A _don't touch_ sort of yank, which had clearly done no good, because here they were. Half-way open and swaying gently.

Shivering, she leaned her weight on her feet and made ready to get up and close them again, when her eyes landed on a bunch of familiar shapes on the floor. Trianglebobs. Fins.

Ghost's shell.

In pieces.

She stared dumbly.

"Ghost?" she managed, hoarsely.

No answer. Just her heart and the City's murmurs splashed against the window. Say what you want, but the noise isolation in this little box was pretty good.

. . .

She shook her head. "Ghost, this isn't funny."

When he didn't respond once again, Nicole admitted to a rush of ice welling from her chest. Did it make her forget about the pain that'd made its home there? Maybe. She jerked to her feet.

She found one fin, then two. She also found her new shoes, turned over and shoved against a wall. Confused, Nicole took stock, carving a moment out from between all the panic, hurt, and irritation. Everything not nailed down had moved. As if a strong gust of wind had come through and rearranged the place.

Her brows scrunched together and she— "Auwh!" Nicole yelped when something bit at the sole of her left foot. It'd been real sharp, so sharp she thought for a second she'd stepped on a Lego.

Except it wasn't a Lego at all. Standing awkwardly on one leg, Nicole looked down to find Ghost's fin tip. The one she'd taped back on after he'd lost it in the swap. This was bad. This was very bad. And then she found the rest of him, tucked under the curtains. Another fin. A palm-sized ball sat next to it.

Nicole half-hopped over there and dropped to her knees.

"Ghost?" she echoed and made to reach out, only to hesitate with the tips of her fingers a hair's with from touching the small dark ball. "Are you in there?"

He should be, right? This was the voice box sitting at the centre. The bit with the eye on. His core-thing.

Silence.

She swallowed once. And then, carefully, scooped it up into her cupped hands. It? _Him._ Yeah. Him. That was right. Her infuriating Ghost, all condensed into a surprisingly heavy lump of dull metal. Heavier than she remembered, at any rate. And so so so so quiet.

"Come on, say something," she said, getting back up.

More nothing. The ball rolled between her palms, slowly turning from one side to the other. Large indents were set into its surface, like perfectly round pits, the largest of which was at the front, framing the eye. An eye she suddenly wished to be flashing blue, rather than sit there, empty.

* * *

**O**ne by one his subroutines called home, each and every one of them flooded with errors. Nothing critical though. Just a lot of misalignments that'd sort themselves out eventually, so Ghost dismissed them wholesale until he finally reached his sensor logs while the rest of him came online one by one.

_Always check what knocked you out,_ he'd learned years ago. Unless you want to blow a circuit because it got damaged by an arc trap and then limp back home at a crawl, of course.

Which he'd totally not done.

No. Of course not. He knew better.

(He hadn't. Not back then.)

Fortunately, this time it hadn't been an arc trap that'd knocked him out. Neither had it been a superheated slug smacking him out of the air. Rather, it'd been his Guardian's Light quite literally blowing _his_ Light out. He, for one, hadn't known that was even possible, but here he was, coming back around with his logs telling him all about it.

It was really quite graphic.

Oh. And he'd lost his shell. Which made the realisation that he sat in his Guardian's hands unexpectedly jarring.

Ghost panicked.

* * *

**O**ne moment he was here, the next he was gone, dissipated in a puff of blue light. Making an unflattering noise, Nicole dropped her hands as soon as the weight in them lifted. She took a startled step back.

"Ghost? Are you— are you okay? What happened?" She turned in a circle, the sole of her Lego'd foot clinging to an ounce of pain. But at least her pipes had stopped seizing.

"I'm good," he said, not sounding it. What with his voice pitching irregularity. "I'm fine. Perfectly okay."

Nicole stuck her arm out and waved it at nothing, like a cat batting after a wink of light. "And _where_ are you?"

"Here. I'm right here."

"Quit faffing about. You know this isn't one bit hilarious."

"I'm not _faffing,_" he explained, sounding like he'd come a little closer. She grabbed into the general direction his voice had come from. What she caught was a whisper of air and a curious: "What's faffing?"

"You're not telling me the world forgot _faffing._ That's tragic."

Silence came after that. Enough for her to pick up the soft electronic whirrs and clicks that followed him around everywhere.

"Ha," he said all of a sudden, startling her, right before he shook himself out of a shower of blue motes. "Thought so. I am definitely not faffing."

Nicole folded her arms. Ghost, in turn, seemed to catch himself in the air. His eye turned away from her, fixing on nothing in particular instead.

"I looked it up," he told the wall. "Not faffing."

An unexpected smile wrestled her lips up, chased by a barmy giggle bouncing around in her chest. She kept the giggle down because that was mostly hysteria, but the smile could stay.

"You're embarrassed," she said.

His eye flicked to her. "Look, I don't usually fly around without a shell on."

She quirked a brow. He wiggled left and right — and looked very much like a few ounces of tightly packed together shame. Ridiculously small, too. Much smaller than even Darrow, despite how John's Ghost had a perfectly round shell that must have sat tight to his core.

"It takes some time to get used to," he added. "That's all."

"Mhm. So. What happened?" She waved at him, then at the bits on the floor.

"Oh. Aaah. Ahaha. You did."

Nicole's arms dropped. So did the smile that'd been trying hard to start a life, dying before it got the chance to. The giggle right up imploded, sucking all remaining joy into the void with it. "What?"

"You were having a nightmare," Ghost said.

She gave him a lame nod. "I remember that. Thanks."

"A rough one from what I could tell. Lots of tossing. And turning. Then some more tossing. Nightmare stuff. So I thought to myself 'Hey, Ghost, you should probably wake her up.' Except when I did—" He paused and wiggled back an inch. "—wham."

"Wham."

"_Wham._ You hit me with a Void Light shockwave and then some. Knocked me clean out." His voice lowered. "It smarted."

A heavy chill collected in her chest. Granted, it didn't outright try and choke her, but it served as a good reminder to what she'd woken up from and what she'd woken up _to._ Swallowing hard, Nicole retreated to the bed and sat. She laid her hands out on her knees, staring at them. Her perfectly normal looking hands attached to perfectly normal looking arms. Yet nothing was just that.

Ghost promptly followed her. "I'm _fine,_" he insisted. "The, ah, the apartment is fine. Nothing broke. Except for my shell, but that was going to fall off soon anyway. And you? You're— ah—" He placed himself into her field of vision. "—you're okay?"

She raised her eyes to him. "I wish you'd stop asking me that."

"No can do."

* * *

**G**host stood his ground, even if his Guardian didn't much like his answer. Or, well, technically he _hovered_ his ground, really. But nevermind that, because who in their right mind got hung up on terminology like that when they had a Guardian sitting in front of them who sat at the knife's edge of a spiral.

"This is just going to get worse, isn't it?" she asked once she realised he couldn't just be stared out of the air like that. He wasn't budging. Wasn't going anywhere. She needed him.

Though need or not, he didn't know how to answer that. Nothing reassuring came to mind, at any rate. All he had was a lame _probably._

"And then one day— tomorrow— day after— in a week— I'll hurt someone?"

Ghost jerked up. If he'd had a shell it'd bristled. "What, no. You're not going to hurt anyo—"

"I blew your shell off," she interrupted him. She did that a lot. Interrupt him. "I hurt _you._"

"Pfah. That? That was nothing. I was being dramatic."

Her jaw set.

_Not helping, you pint-sized shank._

"_But,_" he added, trying anyway, "if you're so worried about controlling your Light, then all you have to do is tell Ikora you've thought about her offer and that it sounds great and yeah, you'll take her up on it."

She swallowed and looked down. Her fingers splayed out on her knees, trembling. Hard to believe he'd caught her smiling earlier. Not much, no. Just a little. But that was gone. Traded in for a thin-lipped frown, clammy looking ashen skin, and haunted eyes.

It broke his heart, okay? Or core. Whatever. It broke _something_, shut up.

How she withdrew so damn quickly, slamming every door and window and leaving nothing but an invisible wall for him to crash into.

"We'll keep it quiet too, like Ikora said. No one needs to know about any of it, about the Speaker bits and the Light bits. It'll be a secret until you're ready."

'_Good luck with that,'_ Shephard had said to that and pointed a finger to the coffee shop entrance. Three unbound Ghosts had hung at the edge of a window, peering in. Ikora had frowned at him. And his Guardian had shrunk behind her cup.

"I guess," she said now.

Not no. Not yes. A _guess_. Was that good? Or bad? Was he making a good case for it and was she going to extend the couple of days she'd given him?

So many questions. No hooting answers.

Ghost floated to her left shoulder. Then over to her right and back around, deliberating as he went. "So. Ah. That nightmare you had? Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

Wall. Meet Ghost. But a learning animal he was not and a shake later he gave it another go. Full throttle ahead.

"Did it have a wolf in it?"

His Guardian shook her head.

Good. _Good._ A glancing blow against the wall this time. An answer. Answers were good. Though now that he had one he didn't know what to do with it, so he tossed it aside and just hung around motionless for a while.

So did his Guardian, turning herself into a hunched forward statue, her shoulders dropped low.

He looked at her. Looked away. Looked at her again — and finally turned to flick a scan over the apartment. In particular over the sad pieces of his busted shell.

"Tape won't fix that," he said, mournful. "This is my fourth shell, you know."

"Fourth? So, you can just grow a new one?" She sounded almost hopeful there.

He blinked. "No. Don't be silly. I can't _grow_ a new one. That'd be like you growing clothes."

She huffed. "So… can we _get_ you a new one?"

He swung around. We? _We?_ She'd said we. Excitement spiked in his circuits, even though his Guardian kept her eyes turned down as if she'd found something exceptionally interesting on the floor between her bare feet.

He nodded. Which meant he bobbed the entirety of his exposed core up and down. Probably looked like a real fool doing so, but hey. Wasn't like anyone was watching.

"Where from?"

"The Tower," he said at length.

She accepted that with a faint nod. "And the Tower, like the City, never sleeps?"

"Mhm. Never."

His Guardian nodded again, this time with a pinch of conviction. She also got to her feet. Ghost bumbled aside.

"Let's go get you a shell then. How does that sound?" Her eyes came up. Still haunted and so very, very weary.

"Perfect," he admitted. "That sounds perfect." And because he meant it, he added, quietly: "I'd like that very much."


	19. Ghost in a Shell

**Taffer Notes:** Before we get started this time, I'd like to take a moment to thank my readers. All of you. The quiet ones. The ones that leave me notes (I read all of them and I say THANK YOU every dang time and hope your ears itch cause I just thought about you).

* * *

**Ghost in a Shell**

* * *

**B**y the time Nicole had worked up enough courage to leave the flat, the sky had lined itself with a thin ribbon of faint light. Not as if she'd needed daylight to see, no. The Traveler gave off plenty light by itself, throwing back starlight and moonlight and the city light below - easily outshining the round, fat moon lingering off to the side.

_Must have sucked_, she thought. Getting dethroned from being the fanciest thing in the sky, reduced to an afterthought ready to slip back beyond the horizon. She squinted and stopped walking, idly grabbing for a lamp post to steady herself. A _scarred _afterthought?

Since when'd the moon have scratches? She rubbed the bridge of her hand over her eyes and looked again. Nope. Still there.

"Ghost?"

"That's me," he said immediately. From a coat pocket, no less. The left one on her chest, which he'd snuck into when she'd not been looking, turning himself into a soft, warm lump snug against her ribs.

At least he was considerably more compact without the shell on. Didn't mean it hadn't startled her and made her turn red as a tomato with how ribs and breasts kind of took up a lot of shared space.

Nevermind that though.

"Does the moon have _scratches_?"

"Uh. Yes," he said in exceptional detail.

"I can't fathom what'd manage to gauge up the _moon _of all things."

"They're fissures. From under its crust. It's— ah— there's a lot going on under it," he said, cryptically. "Hive. A lot of Hive."

"Hive. There's things. On the moon." Nicole dropped her eyes from said moon shoved her free hand into a pocket. Her fingers touched the paper tucked in there. The one that read _Help Wanted, _because she'd not found it in her to leave the flat without it. Crumpled and twisted as it was. Now she clung to it like that'd undo what she'd just heard.

It didn't.

"Mhm," Ghost hummed before he launched into a quick-fire ramble. "Shephard spent a lot of time up there, I bet he could tell you just about all about it. About the Ocean of Storms— that's the scratches, by the way —and all the abandoned lunar bases and the Hellmouth." He paused. "That's where he and his fireteam took out Crota. A Hive god. God prince. Either or. It was a pretty big deal."

Nicole rolled her eyes and let go of the lamp post and walked on. Nope. She wasn't going to dwell on how there were _things _crawling under the moon's skin. Rather, she tried to put some distance between thoughts of that and her, which ended with a whole lot of fidgety steps and with her eyes wandering.

And Ghost kept up his history lessons — or, rather talking about John, really. It was still all moon adjacent, like that part where he'd hitched a ride with him and Darrow once, running an errand for someone named Eris. Who, to quote, _smiled even less than her._

She half-listened, half didn't, while her eyes kept darting to shadowy corners and into the direction of every noise imaginable. Familiar or not. Footsteps. _Echoes_ of footsteps. Voices. Doors. Early rising pigeons taking off with the whistling beats of wings.

Everything had teeth. Far as her nerves told her, anyway.

And so engrossed she was in being flighty, that she didn't even notice Ghost had stopped fanboying over the, air quotes on, _Young Wolf_, air quotes off.

"You're safe here," he said all of a sudden, shifting ears entirely and with his voice muffled by how she'd hugged her arms to her side, effectively squishing him. "We're inside the City walls, it's the safest place you can be."

"Is it? I'm not deaf. I heard Ikora talk about dead Guardians and the dead Ghosts."

"Well… ahh." The weight in her pocket and the pressure against her ribs suddenly lifted. Ghost appeared in front of her, a dark ball mostly made of an animated eye. "I don't know what that's about, but don't worry," he declared. "I won't let anyone or anything sneak up on you." He spun left. Then right. His eye let a thin sheet of light sweep the area with what she assumed to be mostly show, right before he orbited her head once before settling in the air a little above her left shoulder. "I'm very observant, you know."

"Uh-huh…"

"So, you don't need to be scared — is what I am trying to say."

"That's my secret, Ghost," she started, looking at him with her head slightly tilted. "I'm always scared."

He leaned his entire body to regard her, the light his eye was made of briefly widening. "Oh."

_Right. A few hundred years too late for that._

That the reference fell flat didn't surprise her. It stung instead, reminding her how nothing of what'd once made her who she was and who she wasn't, mattered any more.

None of it.

* * *

**S**ure, the City technically never slept. Someone was always awake somewhere, going about important City duties and whatnot, but it was the Guardians who kept the Tower lit and busy all night long. Fireteams rolled through at any possible hour, chasing heroics and parties and contests and that general state of revelling that didn't care whether the sun was up or not.

Ghost had always liked coming back to the Tower for exactly that reason.

Though at the crack of dawn? The hour where night and day traded places? That was when even _Guardians_ put on a slouch. The ones who'd been up all night showed a bit of wear — some because they'd returned from a patrol, others because they'd forgotten to sleep — and the ones who'd only just gotten up were trying to convince themselves they were ready for another day.

Ghost rather liked that, too.

His Guardian though seemed generally unaware of anything and everyone. Sleepy fireteams included. Where she'd stared before (at least a little), she now generally kept her eyes down and trudged after him as he led her across the main Tower plaza.

Least until she raised her chin and, out of the blue, asked: "So… is Ikora a Guardian?"

He paused midair. She stopped — and didn't take another step until he floated on forward again.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course."

"Don't all Guardians have Ghosts?"

"They do. Generally. Though there are some who lost their Ghosts and still fight for the City regardless. See, if you lose your Ghost, Guardians still have their light, but there's no coming back from a death." When she opened her mouth, he quickly added: "_But,_ Ikora still has hers. His name is Ophichus. He just— ah— they're not on speaking terms and he likes to keep a low profile." He bristled (on the inside, naturally, since he had no shell to puff out) and his voice grated out in half a mutter that tapered off into a conspirative whisper towards the end of the complaint. "Though I'd have thought meeting you would have gotten his attention. With the whole Speaker thing, you know?"

"I see."

Aaaand down to the floor her eyes went again.

_Grand_.

* * *

**G**host darted into a narrow doorway framed in decorated, aged copper. Nicole gave it a cursory look. Plaques were fixed all around the open doorway missing an actual door, most bearing symbols that made no sense to her. A few were English with what she figured was the glimmer price attached to them, though even those made no sense. Safe for the bit about shells and armour, the rest read like technobabble out of a sci-fi novel.

Right. That was what this all was to her, wasn't it? She swallowed and stepped inside.

Past the threshold, things were pretty dark. Not _dark_ dark, but a universal lack of light when the sun was meant to come up but hadn't quite yet — though you'd already switched off most of the lights. It was also stuffy. _Second-hand_ stuffy, married to the scent of metal and oil.

"Need a hand?" a man's voice called from her left, making her jump and stuffing a knot down her throat.

Which she hated. She _hated _her nerves. Hated the jitters. Hated the fear. Hated that shopping had gone from terrifying to horrifying. Or horrifying to terrifying. Whichever one was worse.

And she hated not having words while a perfectly normal-looking fresh-faced young lad with bright orange hair asked her a perfectly normal and perfectly polite question.

Really, really hated it all.

Ghost rolled in front of her, and the lad put two and two together.

He lifted his arm to point into a maze of crowded, narrow spaced shelves. "Shells are in the back."

"Thanks," Ghost said cheerfully and then practically herded her out of view.

Two shelves in, Nicole finally dislodged the clump from her throat.

"What's this then?" she asked, stopping by and vaguely indicating a suit of armour draped over a skeletal metal frame standing in a gap between shelves. "Some sort of thrift shop? This getup looks like its been places already."

A sturdy, faded green and brown material made up most of it, with thick padding around the shoulder and arms and what looked like a plate set into the chest. It had gloves, too. And bracers which were on all lopsided, and legs that came with enough leather straps to make any goth jealous.

There were also knee-pads. Well. No. _One_ knee-pad. Because fuck the other knee, right?

She lifted a hand to poke at the helmet perched at the top. A hood was fixed to the back of it and it'd fallen over the brow, halfway concealing a wide, black visor. Nicole stuck her finger under the fabric and tried to lift it so she could get a better look, when the entire damn thing tilted and fell off.

She took a startled step back, caught the helmet, and fumbled with it, bouncing it between her hands like a hot potato. Ghost rolled in from the side when she almost dropped it again and promptly reverse printed it straight out of the air.

"I don't know what a thrift shop is, but this here is a good place to get used gear. Guardian armour and tech isn't cheap to make, see." He angled himself next to the armour stand and made the helmet reappear, neatly perched on the frame's neck. "Do… do you want to look around for—"

… why'd he have to sound so _hopeful _there?

Nicole's lips twisted at the thought of sticking her head into a helmet someone else had worn while they'd been about getting bloody. She waved him off. "No. We're here to get you a shell."

"Obviously. Yes. Shell. This way."

**A**fter the helmet incident, Nicole decided to keep her hands to herself. Hands were, after all, not made for looking.

"Hm, what about this one?" Ghost asked, his eye fixed on a round shell kept in place with wires sticking out of what might or might not have been a tennis ball. Was tennis still a thing? Anyway… the shell had three sections at the top and three more at the bottom, all made of metal with football sorts of patterns stamped into them. (What about football? Proper football. Not eggball.) Two more narrow sections ran along the sides. _Cheeks,_ she thought. This shell had cheeks. Rich orange cheeks, too, while the rest of it was painted a matte black.

Nicole leaned forward, her hands steepled behind her back, and considered the shell with a tilt of her head. It wasn't purple, but...

"You want to be like Darrow? Round?"

"What? _No._ No. Never." He wiggled back. "Not this one then. How about that one?" He zipped up to the ones at around eye level and began a slow sideways glide punctuated by the once in a while odd _Hmm_ noise.

"You're not very decisive, are you?"

"Hey, to some of us shells are a deeply personal thing. Especially the very first one our Guardian gets for us. It's special. A once-in-a-lifetime thing."

"So, what, the white one was the stock one? The one that all my stalkers float around with?"

"We're made with one of those, yes." He turned to regard her. "And I think they can't help it? To them, you probably register like a tiny, walking Traveler. I can't think of any unbound Ghost that _wouldn't_ want to come and look."

"Right."

"Right," he echoed and went back to hemming and hawing over shells.

Which there was a lot of, to be fair. And they ranged from the eight-pronged fin shape she'd almost gotten used to, to round and everything imaginable in-between. There was even one that looked like a rather large starfish. The glimmer price tag on that one was twice of what she'd paid for her clothes. _All _of her clothes.

Their colours were also all over the place. Matte and subtle. Garish. Outlandish. It was all there. No wonder it took him forever to decide.

"I should be exhausted," she suddenly said, the thought coming to her and bubbling up without her explicit permission while she studied a round shell half-covered in pink glitter. "I mean, I am. I'm knackered and all, but most of that's from the nerves?" She looked down and lifted her right knee. "Like, my legs? They are kind of solidified jelly from all the walking. But they should be _goop_."

"Guardian perks," he said, not looking back at her.

"Yeah, okay. That why I don't get winded? Used to be I'd be out of breath after a set of stairs, now I can run up slopes and whatnots."

"Mhm."

"But my hip padding? That's still there," she mumbled two shells later, her hand idly squeezing at said hip. "What's up with that?"

This time, Ghost swung around and blinked. "Your what?"

. . .

"Nevermind. Forget I said anything."

"It's very hard for me to forget anything." Ghost said mysteriously while he ticked left, then right.

"I just… I mean… on one hand, I'm still me, but on the other, I'm not? This shoulder here?" She raised her left arm. "I used to have a kink in it where I couldn't get the arm up all the way without it smarting a little. That's gone. And my eyes used to be awful. I _mean_ awful. Now they're not." She dropped her arm just enough to direct her hand to her nose, a finger wanting really badly to nudge a pair of phantom glasses up along the bride of it. "And the funny thing? I kind of miss my glasses and that's probably the last thing I ever thought I'd be sad to see gone. Ever."

Nicole sighed and looked at Ghost, who hovered there, staring back at her in silence (for once). When he went back to inspecting future shells, her idle right hand snuck down to her trouser pocket. Unsurprisingly, it didn't find what it was looking for.

"I also miss my phone," she said, feeling exceptionally lame. Because she missed a lot of things that were so much more important and had a lot more meaning. But right now? Right now she could have gone for some idle scrolling to take her mind off a world she didn't understand. Instead, she swiped the first shell within reach off the shelf to turn it around in her hands. Though she wasn't really _looking._

"Your what?" Ghost wiggled over next to her.

"My… phone. Like you keep in touch with other people with it and use it to look at cute animal pictures. And sometimes you watch cat videos. Or—" Nicole lifted the shell next to her head like she was putting on headphones. "—listen to music." A memory which, without asking her if it was alright to, got her head to bob to a long-lost rhythm and her hips to give a minuscule sideways swing.

Ghost's eye got exponentially bigger before pulling together into a tiny dot.

"Well," he said. "That's what you have _me_ for now." His eye (and in essence the whole ball that was him) bounced up to the left, a gesture which was so reminiscent of a human trying to remember something, that it was a tad creepy. A tick later, a data stream poured into the air in front of her and came together to form a palm-sized kitten. It had more floof than strictly necessary and struggled valiantly against sleep, its tiny head drooping and a half-open mouth presenting a picture-perfect blep.

Nicole choked up a quiet laugh. One so raspy and sudden, it must have knocked something loose in her chest. Something sharp, but not unkind. It slid right into her heart — and because she wasn't prepared to experience anything else than dread and grief or a desolate numbness, she felt a bit like crying.

A whole lot of a bit.

She fought off the tears with a swallow that made her throat click. It worked, some, and she even managed a morose smile when the kitten finally flopped over. The hologram winked out. _Goodnight, little floof._

"I also have music," Ghost blurted and inched closer. His enthusiasm was back. With a vengeance. "A lot of music. The most."

"The most," she repeated and quirked a brow.

"Well. I mean. Yes. The majority of it is very old, too. Pre-Golden age." He glanced at the shell she held in her hand before adding: "From your first life."

Nicole leaned back on her heels and glanced to the floor. She didn't know what to say to that. What to do. All she could do was stand here and weigh the shell in her hand because she couldn't figure out how to deal with that condensed bundle of _I'm trying real hard_ hovering in front of her.

_This isn't his fault,_ she suddenly thought. _Not really._

But she blamed him anyway. Admitting that made her heart sink.

"Hey, Guardian?"

Her lips twitched down and she raised her eyes.

"I think I like this one." He shimmied closer to her hand.

Nicole held up the shell and turned it around. It was one of the eight-pronged ones. With the fins. Faded orange — a colour that cosied up with the thought of being brown — covered a lot of it, with a dark leaf pattern cupping the centre like two hands held together by the wrist. Some of its tips were a tarnished, light grey, and so was the last inch of the bottom fins. Small symbols marked it there. Symbols she'd seen scattered around the City on all her sight-seeing trips where she'd been doing very little seeing or sighting at all.

"This? It looks _very_ used."

"It's a City shell," he said as if that explained everything. Which maybe it did, considering how he'd blabbered on about the place. Over. And over. Again.

"I mean, alright. If you like it you like it, I'm not going to argue. So how does it go on? Do you need my help with it or… ah…" She held it up a little higher.

"No, I've got this."

And in a shower of what she more and more thought of as data sparks, Ghost _and_ the shell disappeared, leaving her to catch the tennis ball and wire before they dropped to the floor.

When he reappeared, he'd donned the shell already, its front and back spinning wildly into different directions.

"Ha!" he exclaimed and stopped spinning to wiggle each individual section. His eye turned like he was a person checking out the sleeves of a new coat. "How do I look?"

"You look fine," she said. "It fits. The colours are alright, and there's no pieces missing."

"Hm." Ghost paused. "Not entirely true. There's _something_ missing." And when he looked at her again, his eye squished into an upwards turned arrow. It didn't last long and maybe she'd just imagined it, but for a moment she thought that'd been a smile. "I bet they have tape here. Come on. Let's go find some tape."

"Tape," she echoed quietly, not getting it. "Alright. Why not. You do you, Little Light."

Ghost groaned and zipped back into the maze of shelves, his quest for a shell completed, and that for tape just begun.

* * *

**C**hewing on her bottom lip in concentration, Nicole sat a little ways off from the shop, her arse planted on a cold, hard bench. Ghost perched in her left hand, his shell held perfectly still while she carefully fixed a short strip of electrical tape over the edge of his topmost and forward-facing fin.

Red tape. It'd _had_ to be red.

"Honestly, I didn't think that's what you wanted tape for," she said, flattening out one end with her thumb.

"What else could I possibly need it for?"

Every modulated word got his shell to vibrate ever so slightly — and for some reason or the other that startled her. A little, anyway. She splayed her fingers out away from him and held him up at eye level.

"I don't know. Ghost stuff?"

He lifted off her palm and she snuck that hand back into her coat. The other one followed a moment after, its fingers finding paper. _That_ piece of paper.

"Well, I like it," he said, turning the back of his shell in an idle circle, unaware of how her mind wandered.

"So you're sentimental. Got it. A sentimental Little Light."

As expected, his shell went ahead and bristled. He squinted at her.

Nicole snorted.

"Sorry," she said and got to her feet, eyes raised to the crest of the wall, from where a sheet of morning sunlight lanced out across the City. "It's quite fetching, don't worry. The tape, I mean." She shifted on the spot. Fidgeted. Looked left to the shop entrance and then over the way they'd come from.

A tightness grabbed at her chest. A restlessness. Something that told her she ought to not stand around for too long, lest all the pain would catch up. And if it did, what'd she do?

"Say, Ghost—" She pulled the paper from her pocket and held it up.

He swung around in an instant. "Yes?"

"Take me back there?"

His eye flicked to the folded note, then to her, and gave an oddly reassuring pulse followed by a nod.


	20. Cats

**Taffer Notes:** This chapter is shared between Nicole and John, with Mav coming back to write John and Darrow for me. I love him almost as much as I love Mav.

* * *

**Cats**

* * *

**B**y the time they'd reached the _Daily Revive_, Nicole had picked up a trail. Ghosts, naturally. Four of them. She'd collected them one by one until they'd formed a small swarm, which dove around corners and up over roofs and arches as they tumbled around each other in a constant display of something distinctly playful. Something careless.

_Harmless._

And while they'd followed her, always at a distance, she'd succumbed to anxiety.

Not any less or any more than she'd been doing ever since — you know, _that_ — but the subjects were different this time around. Rather than being consumed by thoughts of how she was a walking dead person, she'd worried about things a lot less... apocalyptical.

It'd started simple. With a: _Are they even going to accept my application,_ quietly whispered from a muddle corner of her mind.

_Wait, I need to apply?_ she'd asked back at herself. Shocked and frantic and fanning the flames and whatnot. _How?_

_And what if they already found someone?_ the same anxious whisper had said, ignoring her question.

_I suppose I can pretend I'm just here to buy some coffee then._

She'd nodded to herself. A good plan, that.

_Yes, but— what if they accept you and then it turns out you forgot how to make coffee?_

Ultimately, that was the thought that immobilised her. Effectively, too. Right in front of the door, no less, her hands shoved into her pockets and eyes probably all glazed over.

"You know, we can come back another time," Ghost offered, quietly.

Nicole inhaled sharply. "No. No, it's fine. I can do this. I got this." Her eyes flicked up to the sign over the door and then busied themselves skipping down to two tables with chairs arranged outside. The furniture looked brittle, to say the least.

"Of course you can," he said with an almost chirping sort of undertone, "and of course you do."

"Alright. Here I go." Steeling herself against the ordinary, Nicole pushed the door open, the soft chime of its bell scattering the Ghosts that'd followed her and her nerves along with them.

* * *

**W**hen John had first come in, the Daily Revive had been surprisingly still — for a second or two. Darrow floated annoyingly close to his head, but he tried to ignore it as he approached the counter, flowers in hand. Chrysanthemums, to be precise. They were a big hit around here, especially the yellow kind.

A door in the back somewhere creaked open, and Darrow quietly took to hovering a little farther up in preparation for— yeah, there she was.

Instantly, before any sign of the owners had appeared, a totally massive cat made of at least ninety percent fluff practically flew right up onto the counter without a single sound, like she was just a shadow. Daintily, she padded forward into petting range, and John promptly surrendered one hand to scratch her cheek.

"Hi, Muffin," John said as the cat gently started to purr, surrendering to said cheek scratches and all but falling into his hand. "Say hi, Darrow."

Darrow let off some odd, moody hum that wasn't a hi at all. Rude as ever.

"Y'know you kind of deserve all the times she's bapped you," John said, stroking Muffin's fuzzy chin until she lay with the top of her head flat against the counter in some joyful daze.

"I wonder how you would feel if someone knocked you in the head at each meeting," Darrow sniped.

John made a thoughtful face and shrugged one shoulder. "If she was super cute? I dunno, there'd be several factors involved."

Darrow allowed a short pause. "I don't need to know these things about you."

Next came the familiar face of Ariel Winters, always recognizable from her long, thick, brown braid – and the fact that she was the shorter of the two ladies here. Not that her height made her any less intimidating. Hell, she'd even scared _Darrow _a few times, which was more than a little hard to do in a controlled environment.

A smile wore a few more creases into her aged face, and she sauntered on over behind the counter. John promptly presented the flowers, cocking his head ever so slightly and putting on a smile.

"You don't _have _to slay me every time you walk through the door," said Ariel, taking the flowers and giving them a long sniff.

That only dialed up John's smile more. "I'm just glad I still got it."

"Face like yours, it won't ever go away."

"Please don't encourage it," Darrow muttered, insofar as Ghosts could mutter.

"Hello to you too, Darrow," Ariel added. Then she leaned around John in that way she did when she occasionally chided him for being 'too' tall or 'too' broad-shouldered, as if she really meant it, and eyed the door.

"Getting a premonition?" John asked, lowering his voice to not break the moment.

The moment turned true, because the next second, a familiar ball of anxiety – and he wasn't thinking about Ghost – came through the door. The ball of anxiety that John felt uniquely bad for, though he felt absolutely certain she'd hate him if he ever actually admitted that. From the way Ghost acted, she didn't seem to be too big on pity, really. Or talking to anyone.

Then again, maybe he was just projecting…

Yeah. Probably projecting. Luckily for him, he had at least learned how to pretend to be okay.

"I told you she'd come back," John said with another smile, still half leaning on the counter. Despite not actually looking at him, John could _feel _Darrow roll his eye. Maybe he should've thought ahead of time and grounded him before thinking Nicole might show up.

Speaking of Nicole, though, she froze up and stood there, staring, like an unsocialized cat. In an effort to theoretically offer her a friendly hand, John leaned forward over the counter toward Ariel – who leaned forward to meet him halfway.

"Either that or she's following me," John added, knowing Nicole could still hear him.

Ariel scoffed and shook her head, giving him a light slap on the arm. She smiled, though. At least it worked on somebody.

With a quiet snort, John pushed himself off the counter and straightened up, turning to face Nicole instead. He tried on a different smile then, a more friendly one. What could he possibly do to get her to lighten up? No puns intended. _Relax_, maybe, was the better word.

Because she scowled after that – not that he was buying it at all, it looked absolutely theatrical – and said, "I am not."

John let his smile fall into an equally as forced frown. "Aw," he pouted.

_That _got a response: Nicole went red all over. John couldn't help but let his eyebrows scoot up just a hint as she shoved her shoulders up all defensively and padded into the room almost as quietly as Muffin had flown up onto the countertop. Speaking of Muffin, the cat nuzzled at his nearest arm for more attention, so John absently reached around to start petting her.

"I know you have the _capability_ to be professional," Darrow narrated from closer to his head again. "What I don't understand is why you only exercise it when it's _strictly _necessary."

John put on a smile again, not quite as cheerful as the one before, but he was trying for Nicole's sake. He showed his palms and stepped away from the counter, gesturing Nicole toward it in a way he hoped was inviting. Just to make sure, he bowed his head a little while he was at it, keeping his distance. He wasn't one to crowd anyone, much less her – especially considering he hated being crowded, himself, to this day.

"Ariel," he said, any wryness gone, "this is Nicole."

"Nice to meet you," said Ariel, who glanced Nicole up and down. "I've heard so little about you," she added, throwing John a look. John smiled innocently.

"I don't like spoilers." He, in turn, glanced at Darrow. "You like spoilers?"

"I _always _read spoilers," Darrow replied flatly. "So do you, half the time."

_Fun police_.

"Nicole," John added, "Ariel Winters."

That finally got Nicole to give Ariel a more significant look, and she gave an arguably lame nod. Or, at least, Darrow probably thought it was lame – along with her quiet "hi" – but John found himself feeling sorry for her again. And he decided instantly not to let it show.

"And," John added, lifting a hand to gently rub his fingers together – that instantly got Muffin on her feet again, coming to give his hand a nuzzle, "this is Muffin. She's _very _friendly, don't worry. And soft and gentle. She's like a therapy cat."

"If she didn't love chasing Ghosts so, I'd wonder if she even had claws at all," Ariel put in.

Nicole seemed to be processing that as Ghost – her Ghost – came whisking over to hover high above Nicole's head, watching the cat. That got John to watch _him_, which—

"Now I suppose the Winters have _three_ cats," Darrow narrated, deadpan.

Whatever the hell _that _was supposed to mean…

"Ghost," John said, trying to turn the attention away from squarely and solely on Nicole, "that a new shell? New… new-ish?"

"Oh," Ghost piped up, shell flaring out proudly. "Yes! I'm glad you noticed."

So easy to flatter this guy. It was adorable.

"I like the, ah," John gestured with one hand, "tape. That… presumably you don't actually need anymore."

_If Ghosts could blush_. "Umm…"

Again John smiled. "It's a fashion statement."

"It's handsome," said Ariel.

"See? Exactly, that. Handsome."

Darrow, of course, gave another dry addition: "It's pointless." After a short pause, he hummed and then decided, "Except maybe to help something spot you that shouldn't."

"_Darrow_…" John started, almost through his teeth, because he wanted things to be _nice _here—

Thankfully, a timely interruption came out of the back next: a woman a bit taller than Ariel, with short but striking hair, grey with – currently – streaks of red. Currently, John thought, because those streaks of color changed fairly often.

"Right on time," John said, and Ariel right out grinned.

"Nicole," she said, turning to motion the other woman forward, "this is Samantha, my partner in crime. Sam, this is John's New Light."

John went a little stiff and side-eyed Nicole as she promptly turned red again, and John licked his lips.

"They're sweethearts," he said, voice a little lower, eyes still on her. "Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die."

Nicole, at least, gave him a look. That was as much acknowledgment as he got for now.

"I hate that saying," Darrow said.

"You hate everything, Darrow."

"No, I don't. I just hate most things that you say, Shephard."

"I know you're too asinine to admit how much you appreciate me, but dial it back right now—"

"Boys," Samantha cut in with an amused smile, "is now a bad time to say 'get a room?'"

"It would be approximately the fifteenth time you _or _Ariel have told us that," Darrow said, sounding exhausted. He made an odd buzzing noise, almost like someone sniffing in mild or even good-natured contempt – if such a thought made sense. "And it doesn't even _apply _to Ghosts…"

John just grinned. Except then he noticed Nicole had a brief flash of looking deeply uncomfortable, then he promptly felt oddly like shit and ended up ducking his head.

"So, Nicole, I…" he started – only to get interrupted. _Again._

"Shephard," Darrow barked.

John took a deep breath and turned to face Darrow, eyes narrowed under a furrowed brow. "_Yes_, Darrow?" he said in a sweet but not actually sweet at all tone.

"Well don't get mad at _me_, I'm just the messenger. Shaxx wants you. Something something that awful Crucible where you freak me the hell out banging your head against other Guardians because you don't know how else to deal with trauma."

John set his jaw hard. Yeah, so Darrow didn't like the Crucible at all, but really? In front of Nicole?

Nicole, though, gave her own Ghost a look and asked very, very quietly, "Crucible?"

"Don't worry about that," John almost blurted, before Ghost could say anything, because the _last _thing he wanted Nicole getting exposed to was that. She might even beat Darrow for intensity of dislike.

Ghost's shell flared in a way John found absolutely ominous, because he seemed excited, and some leaden worry dropped heavy into John's stomach that Nicole might learn what the Crucible was pretty soon.

Still, he put on another smile. "Sorry," he said, also giving Ariel and Samantha a glance, "guess I gotta run."

"I'd hate to deprive Shaxx of his favorite Titan," said Ariel.

"Take care, John," added Samantha, because they were good at finishing each other's thoughts like that.

Offering another smile and a nod, John fired a quick two-fingered salute off his forehead for the lot of them. "See you around."

With that, John turned and stalked back out the door, Darrow trailing along at his shoulder. John threw one last look behind him at Nicole and the others as he left, something in him shriveling that he didn't get to hang around and… maybe at least try to make things a little easier. But maybe he only made them worse. He did have a talent for that sometimes.

"And as for you," John said, "you're grounded as hell."

"Oh please," Darrow scoffed. "I don't understand the fascination. Let her find some menial, tedious, cog-in-the-machine job at the Tower and let's move on. We have _plenty _of bigger things to worry about."

He couldn't help but sigh. "Yeah, well… maybe I get tired of worrying about 'bigger' things all the time."

"Oh, great. You aren't doing this to me, are you?"

"_What?_"

"Caring about her."

John stopped and wheeled to face him. "I care about plenty of people, Darrow. And, ya know, you could stand to learn from that."

Darrow stared hard at him for a moment. Then his eye seemed to dim a notch or two and he glanced at the floor instead.

"I care about _you_," was his only answer. "Isn't that enough?"

And somehow, just like that, the asshole made John feel like… well, _he _was the asshole instead. So he licked his lips again, turned, and ducked his head low.

"Be nicer to Nicole, okay?" he halfway muttered.

"I'll make an attempt," Darrow answered in his own sort of mutter.

That was the best he would get for now, probably. So, for now, John kept walking in silence – and now that he wasn't trying to show Nicole around, he did his best to avoid any crowds. Instead, he went quietly, through back allies and narrow pathways. He knew this place all too well.

Sure, he might've compared Nicole to an unsocialized cat, but, if anything, maybe he was the alley cat still – even after all this time and all these heroics – trying to feel like he had a home.

"Now hide me from Shaxx," Darrow almost ordered, breaking the precious stillness. "He's so _loud_."

John almost grinned.

* * *

**T**he door clicked shut, the bell giving another chime, and Nicole stood around feeling like a kite with its lead snapped: Abandoned to the winds.

_This is the worst._

"It might be hard to believe, but we don't bite," Ariel Winters said as she walked around the counter, scooping up— what'd it been… Muffin? —on the way. The cat was big enough to halfway hide the woman behind golden brown fur flecked with generous black tufts. "And neither does John," she added with a bright smile once she'd reached Nicole.

Oh, so she was hiding her terror that _well?_

Nicole, on her part, only managed to blink dumbly. Especially when Ariel lifted the massive bundle of fluff and deposited in her arms. Gosh, she was heavy. But warm. A comforting, warm weight. One that steadily purred against her chest as Nicole held on to her, her fingers and chin easily vanishing into the masses of soft fur. Not that she had to do a lot of holding. Muffin on her part quickly dug her claws into her clothes after only a moment of hanging in her arms and pulled herself up to lay across her shoulder.

_RRrrRRrrRRrr,_ she went. Like she'd swallowed a motor. Her tail swished. Once.

"Oh, don't know," Samantha put in from the back. "Under the right circumstance you'd hope he might?"

Ariel hummed thoughtfully in response.

Muffin's tail went _swish_ again, giving Nicole something to focus on. Something that wasn't the anxiety chewing up her insides. A distraction so effective, she nearly missed Ariel's and Samantha's rather important exchange.

"Good, looks like Muffin likes you," Ariel said. "What do you think, Sam?"

"Hey, works for me."

Nicole spooled her thoughts back in. Sorted them away from swishing cat tails, loud purring, and that one wayward one that'd zeroed in on the biting. Right on time, too, what with how both women were giving her meaningful looks. Ariel from right in front of her, her arms folded, and Samantha from the back still, a cup in her hands which was getting an idle polish with a rag.

"You're hired," they said. Together. And perfectly in sync.

"Uh—" Nicole shifted on her feet. "I am? You don't need me to— I don't know— turn in an application?"

"With what on it?" Samantha asked, her tone teasing but kind. She put the cup down and slung the rag around her arm. "Recently risen, but have coffee-brewing in my bones?"

_Oh. Right._ She'd forgot.

"I, ah," Nicole took a deep breath (which promptly resulted in her getting a nose full of cat hair). "Ta."

The women exchanged looks. Samantha's smile blossomed and she clapped her hands together. Softly though. Not the sort of _CLAP _that'd have made Nicole jump. "And our _first_ Irish Guardian. Can you believe it?"

"Scottish," Ariel corrected. She looked a wee proud when Nicole nodded lamely to acknowledge her being not Irish at all. "That Hunter kid who brought us the waffle iron was Irish. You know, the one with the heart shapes?"

"Ah! Yes, I remember him. Such an eager kid, hope he's been careful out there." Samantha abandoned the back of the café to join them in the no-man's land of Nicole's confusion and ever-lasting dread. "So, Nicole, when'd you like to start?"

Muffin's purring paused briefly, and Nicole divided her attention between turning her head a little to eyeball the cat, and cooking up an answer that didn't sound too desperate.

"I don't exactly have anything lined up," she admitted. "Whenever you need me to?"

"How about now?" Samantha asked.

Nicole nodded more on reflex than anything. Ghost had caught her eye as he shimmied closer to her, his shell twitching in a display of curiosity as he got closer and closer and closer, his slowly blinking eye set on Muffin.

"Perfect," Ariel said and waved her forward before indicating the shop with a sweep of her arm. "Let's get you orientated then."

"And you might want to be carefu—" Samantha started, albeit a little too late.

With only a hint of a warning, her ear flicking back, Muffin's paw shot out and batted Ghost right over a fin.

He spun out under the swat with a _Aaha_ trailing him before bouncing back up wiggling backwards, out of reach of another swat. Nicole failed at keeping a grin down and earned herself a theoretical scowl given weight by a slanted fin.

Nicole let the cat down after that. Which wasn't as easy as it might sound — between the hooks for claws and all the weight. But down she went anyway and padded right off, weaving between Ariel's feet before moving on to butt heads with Samantha's ankles.

"What was it we're hiring her for again?" Samantha asked while stepping around the slinky cat and turning to lead the way to the back of the café.

Ariel shrugged. "I don't know. John didn't exactly say."

He hadn't what now? Nicole exchanged a look with Ghost, who shrugged his fins to say _Iunno. _So when the Winters gestured for her to follow, Nicole only did once she'd dug out the well-worn piece of paper.

She unfolded it, stared at it, and wondered how it'd never occurred to her that it'd been odd how the note was handwritten and looked like it'd been scribbled in a hurry. She looked up at the Winters' backs. And not in a script she'd credit to either of the ladies. Frowning, Nicole pocketed the note and kept walking, trailing not only her Ghost, but a whole lot of confusion.


End file.
